The long-awaited audio recordings of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interview with then-President Joe Biden were leaked over the weekend and did nothing to quell the assessment that the former commander-in-chief was, as Hur infamously wrote in his report, “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
On Saturday, Axios published the audio from the five-hour interview Hur conducted with Biden in October 2023 related to the investigation into his mishandling of classified documents after sensitive material from Biden’s time as vice president and U.S. senator were found at his home and former office.
Hur was highly criticized by Democrats and the media for his determination, but Biden can be heard struggling to recall noteworthy dates and losing his train of thought as he went off on unrelated tangents throughout the sit down.
On Monday’s show, Megyn was joined by National Review’s Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cooke to discuss the tapes and how shameless the incessant defense of Biden’s mental acuity proved to be.
The Hur Report
Hur conducted the five-hour interview with Biden over the course of October 8 and October 9, 2023, in the White House Map Room, and it became a key factor in his decision not to pursue criminal charges against the president.
In his bombshell February 2024 report, the special counsel explained his reasoning, citing concerns that a jury might perceive the then-81 year old as “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
The audio puts a voice – albeit a halting, garbled, and, occasionally, whisper-like one – and the haunting sound of a ticking grandfather clock to the print transcript of the sit downs released by Biden’s Justice Department in the wake of Hur’s report.
The White House had refused to turn over the recordings, however, because the Biden team deemed them “law enforcement materials” and claimed Republicans only wanted “to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes.”
The Tapes
You can listen to some of the most noteworthy moments – including when Biden failed to remember when his son Beau died (something that, contrary to previous claims, he brought up on his own), when he could not recall when Donald Trump first got elected, and when he gave a rambling and completely unnecessary 12-minute aside about a trip to Mongolia – in the video above because, as Lowry noted, transcripts do not adequately convey just how uncomfortable these uncomfortable exchanges actually were.
“It’s really a public service to have this audio out belatedly because transcripts very often don’t entirely do justice to a video or an audio recording, but this transcript is miles away from what the audio portrays,” he noted. “You can’t get the length of the pauses in the transcripts. You can’t get how painful it is to listen as that grandfather clock is tick-tock, tick-tock, and he is saying nothing, and then he comes back with a whispering voice, and he is bringing up Beau… and then very often he can’t complete his thoughts so he just says ‘anyway’ and stops.”
The ‘Foolish’ Left
Megyn agreed that “hearing [the audio] ourselves is something else” and makes the Democrats and media who rushed to defend Biden and smear Hur look all the more “foolish.” Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), and just about every leftist pundit were among those who accused the special counsel of “politicizing” the report and “gratuitously” adding language that would hurt Biden.
Cooke said the allegations were meritless then and even more so now. “I mean, that is pathological lying… If anything, Robert Hur downplayed it out of respect and probably because he understood that his role was not to end the presidency of Joe Biden, which he could have done if he had decided to sacrifice himself, smuggle the tapes out, and release them to the press. That would have been it for Joe Biden,” Cooke noted. “But he didn’t do that. He wrote a fairly kind report which stayed within the bounds of the remit that he had been given.”
He said the actions of the left – in government and in the media – to discredit Hur and this report cannot go unpunished. “What is just as scary, I think, is the confidence and the indignation with which both Biden and Harris and many of their acolytes in the press and in the Democratic Party tried to bury it and cast it as a lie when it was anything but,” Cooke added. “It is a disgrace, it is a scandal, and it is a chapter in American history that should not be forgotten or bullied away.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Cooke and Lowry by tuning in to episode 1,074 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.