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Shortly after hanging up the phone, the president’s personal attorney Bob Bauer and White House Counsel Ed Siskel arrived at the White House. The group descended a flight of stairs to the map room, where they were to meet with special counsel Robert Hur, who has been investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents for nine months.
The 5 hour and 10 minute interview, which took place over two days, will be extremely important.However, at that time few He foresaw how they would blow up four months later, not because of the content but because Mr. Xu repeatedly mocked Biden’s memories of their time together. In a long-awaited report released this week, Mr. He threatened to upend Biden’s re-election bid.
According to two people familiar with the matter, Mr. Xu’s description of Mr. Biden as “a well-meaning old man with a poor memory” is likely to infuriate Mr. Biden’s aides. They said they thought it was as wildly contradictory as what happened when the president sat through a random interrogation. A person familiar with the matter spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal discussions. Citing the president’s apparent memory problems, Mr. Xu concluded that it would be difficult to convince a jury that Mr. Biden deliberately mishandled classified documents.
In Biden’s team’s view, the questioning was even done in a routine, dry manner, such as prosecutors asking Biden where he bought a particular filing cabinet or how a particular box was packaged. Proceeded.
Biden himself had just held a telephone conversation with U.S. allies affecting the turbulent situation in the Middle East at the time, and was focused on more pressing, world-shaking issues.
Mr. Biden and his lawyers discussed postponing the press conference, but ultimately decided to postpone it. They had already secured the president’s schedule for two days and wanted to postpone the investigation since it was already taking much longer than expected. Members of Mr. Biden’s legal team said Mr. Biden had little to hide and never considered resisting Mr. Xu’s interview requests, believing he could benefit from transparency.
Inside the White House, staffers had converted a space on the first floor into a secure area where they could discuss classified information. A long table was brought into the map room. Its name comes from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s use of the space to reference maps and track the progress of World War II. It is also the room where President Bill Clinton testified to independent counsel Ken Starr about his role in the Monica Lewinsky scandal in 1998.
Mr. Biden and Mr. Xu sat across from each other with about four aides each. A bottle of water was on the table. Bauer was on Biden’s right, and Siskel was on his left. Mr. Herr, who was scheduled to take questions, was accompanied by Mark Krickbaum, former acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, and several FBI agents.
The meeting started almost on time, which is unusual for Mr. Biden, who is perpetually late. Mr. Xu introduced himself, noticed a tape recorder recording the session, listed everyone in the room, and calmly began questioning the president.
According to those involved, the theme was simple and clear. Mr. Heo, who is familiar with the matter and Mr. Heo’s subsequent reports, has tracked the movements of boxes filled with documents over the past several years, including those packed at the end of Biden’s term as vice president. Mr Hoa asked how the documents were packaged and by whom. Mr. Biden was asked when he purchased a particular filing cabinet and what he stored there.
There were a few moments where either side cracked low-key jokes and it felt more like a conversation than a confrontation. But the subject matter and tone were largely dry and fact-based, people familiar with the matter said.
In some cases, Mr. Xu or his aides asked Mr. Biden to confirm that the handwriting on certain documents was his. It also included a folder containing the word “Afghanistan,” a misspelling that prosecutors later said appeared repeatedly in Biden documents dating back to the 1980s. .
Mr. I assumed that it was. The president’s ability to recall dates and other details would be the subject of questioning, much less form such a subversive element in Mr. Xu’s report.
“My God, that goes back a long time,” Biden said at one point, looking at a folder labeled “Pete Rouse,” a longtime Senate staffer who later became an aide to President Barack Obama.
Mr. Biden has at times told Mr. Heo that he has limited knowledge of how the documents ended up where they ended up. At one point, he was asked how a binder labeled “Beau Iowa” ended up in a well-worn box in his garage that also contained classified government material. The president’s son, Beau Biden, died of brain cancer in 2015.
“‘Someone must have put this together and picked up all the stuff and put it in a box because I didn’t,'” Hoare’s report said.
Hoar later recalled that Biden could not remember exactly what year his vice presidency began or ended, citing his “severely limited” memory as evidence. Stated. The president’s allies strongly reject that characterization.
At one point, the discussion turned to the year Beau died. Ho later reported that Biden could not specifically recall that year. Mr. Biden angrily denied knowing when his son died, adding that it was not Mr. Heo’s job to ask such a question in the first place.
It’s unclear exactly how Beau Biden came into the news during the interview, but some classified documents were found mixed in with photos of Beau and the condolence messages he received after his death. Investigators also examined Biden’s notebooks, which they later reported included “notes on purely personal subjects, including the illness and death of his son Beau.” Bo’s name also came up when asked about his post-vice-presidency work, including Cancer Moonshot.
Additionally, investigators investigated the use of classified material in Biden’s book, “Dad, Promise Me,” which deals with the aftermath of Beau’s death, and concluded that no classified material made it to publication.
After several hours of questioning on October 8, the two sides reached a stopping point and the day was over. Later that afternoon, the sound of a live band could be heard outside the White House as the President and First Lady Jill Biden hosted a barbecue for Residence staff and their families.
The next day was Columbus Day, which was a federal holiday on Monday. In the morning, Mr. Biden met with his senior national security advisers and continued to discuss the situation in Israel. They were particularly concerned that Iran and its proxies could take advantage of the unstable situation and escalate the conflict to engulf the entire Middle East.
A senior administration official involved in the response to Israel, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss private discussions, said he was not aware that Mr. Biden was also present at the special counsel’s interview during the international crisis. .
Biden was scheduled to meet with close U.S. allies later in the day in hopes of sharing information and hammering out a joint position and strategy. But first, around noon, it was time to continue the meeting with the special prosecutor and his team. Both sides lined up in the map room again, and the same setup as the previous day was performed.
One of the investigations that afternoon involved a memo on Afghanistan that Biden sent to Obama in 2009. The classified document was taken from the White House by Biden and was later found in a damaged cardboard box near a dog crate in the garage. Broken duct-taped lamps and synthetic firewood. The special counsel later said Biden had a copy of the memo because he saw it as important evidence within the Obama administration that he was right in advocating for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. However, Mr. Obama still rejected this recommendation.
According to Hur’s report, Biden told Hur that he stayed up late on Thanksgiving and handwritten the only memo he had ever sent to Obama, and not to anyone in the government. That’s what it means.
“I was trying to change the president’s mind, and frankly I’m ready to speak out to save the president,” Biden told the special counsel during an Oct. 9 briefing. “I wanted to tell the president,” he said.
He initially told Xu that he did not know that he had kept the memo after leaving his post as vice president in January 2017. When asked a further question, he replied: So this was my position on Afghanistan. And then it became a hot topic… My recommendation for this has become a topic of discussion within the foreign policy establishment. ”
After the interview, Biden and his team felt the session went mostly as expected. They had no idea that Mr. Xu’s final report would provide a scathing account of Mr. Biden’s ostensible memory loss, and that Mr. Biden did not deserve charges for mishandling classified documents. However, his conclusions were politically explosive.
The shock of Mr. Biden’s lawyers is clear from the letter they wrote in response to the report.
“At the beginning of the interview, you recognized that the questions you were going to ask were ‘related to events that happened many years ago,’ but you still asked the president ‘to give some input.’ I look forward to it.” [his] try your best and really try [his] Best recollection of our questions,” Biden’s lawyers wrote. “It’s not fair for a president to be asked about an event that happened years ago, forced to give his ‘best’ memory, and then berated for his poor memory.”
But that was all in the future. So far, Biden’s lawyers feel the interview went as well as expected.
And Biden had more pressing matters.
As soon as the interview ended, he walked to the Oval Office, met with his national security team, and called his European counterparts. He also called Sen. Cory Booker (D.N.J.), who is in Israel, to check on him and see if there was anything the White House could offer.
That night, the White House was lit up in blue and white, the colors of the Israeli flag, in solidarity with an ally that had lost more than 1,000 people in terrorist attacks and was about to start a long and dangerous war. Mr. Biden was holed up at his official residence that night, preparing for a speech the next day, according to people close to him.
Yasmeen Abutaleb, Perry Stein and Tyler Pager contributed to this report.
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