Washington:

An angry and emotional US President Joe Biden defended his mental competency in a rare evening speech on Thursday in response to scathing comments in a report released hours earlier into his mishandling of classified documents.

Biden appeared on live television from the White House, angered by reports that he couldn’t even remember the date of his son Beau’s death in 2015 and other key moments in his life.

“I have a good memory,” he said.

“It was even mentioned that I don’t remember when my son died. How the hell does he dare bring that up?” Biden said, clearly struggling to control his emotions.

Special counsel Robert Hull’s report should be good news for Biden.

It clears him of any criminal wrongdoing in the storage of classified documents at his private home and former office that he used as vice president under Barack Obama.

That contrasts with a separate criminal investigation into Biden’s likely rival for the presidency in November, Donald Trump, who is accused of taking a trove of top-secret documents after leaving the White House in 2021 and then obstructing their retrieval s hard work.

However, just nine months before the election, Hull dropped a political bombshell, saying the 81-year-old Democrat came across as a “well-meaning old man with a short memory.”

Hull said that given Biden’s diminished mental acuity, the jury would not have found him guilty on the document charges anyway.

“I mean well and I’m an old man and I know what the hell I’m doing,” Biden said when asked about the comment from a White House reporter after his official remarks.

“I’m the president and I got this country back on its feet,” he said. “Look what I’ve done since I became president.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson and other top Republican leaders in the House called Huer’s report “deeply troubling” and said it showed Biden was “unfit” to serve as president.

“An individual who cannot be held accountable for the mishandling of classified information is certainly not fit to serve in the Oval Office,” they said in a statement.

Earlier Thursday, Biden announced that Hull had been cleared of any legal matters, meaning “the matter is now closed.”

However, that’s clearly not the case – as Biden’s highly unusual last-minute televised address showed.

Biden has long battled attacks from the right and some in his own party that he is too old to be president. As he prepares for the November election against Trump, who he says poses an existential threat to American democracy, Biden is banking on his long experience and management of a rapidly recovering post-pandemic economy. Ability to campaign.

“I am the most qualified person in America to be president and get this job done,” he said in late-night remarks.

But it’s hard to escape the impact of Hull’s vitriolic remarks.

Biden also didn’t help himself when answering a reporter’s question about Israel’s war in Gaza, momentarily conflating Mexico and Egypt.

Hour was appointed by Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, last year after classified materials were discovered at the president’s Delaware home and a former office.

The 388-page report alleges that Biden “intentionally withheld and disclosed classified material” in the period after he left office as vice president – well before he defeated Trump to become president in 2020.

Houle, who was previously nominated by Trump to be Maryland’s top prosecutor, said FBI agents recovered documents related to military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, among other matters.

However, Houle said: “We concluded that the evidence was insufficient to convict and we declined to recommend that Biden be prosecuted for retaining classified Afghanistan documents.”

“It would be difficult to convince a jury that he – then a former president in his 80s – committed a serious felony that required intentional mental state,” Hull later said.

White House special counsel Richard Sorbo and Biden’s personal attorney Bob Bauer criticized the remarks as “neither accurate nor inappropriate.”

“The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a common phenomenon among eyewitnesses: a lack of recollection of events that occurred years ago,” they said in a letter to Hull. “Such comments should not appear in the Department of Justice’s in the report.”

The president noted that he conducted a five-hour interview with the special prosecutor on October 8-9, when he was dealing with the beginning of the Israel-Hamas crisis.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)