US President Joe Biden spoke on everything from his beloved Corvette to his archery prowess in Mongolia when being interviewed about classified documents.
They were there to talk about classified documents, but somehow US President Joe Biden’s mind had turned to Mongolia.
Of most importance to investigators, Biden was maddeningly imprecise about the government documents that ended up in his homes and offices where they did not belong. “I don’t remember how a beat-up box got in the garage,” he said. All told, he offered variations of “I don’t remember” or “I don’t recall” more than 50 times.
This was the loquacious Joe Biden that many in Washington remember from his years before the White House, before he learned to check himself a little more in public and stopped giving so many interviews and news conferences where he might go off script. Biden has always had a mind that wandered and a tongue that was loose, often to the chagrin of his advisers.
Biden’s devotion to home design was nonetheless evident. He corrected prosecutors who referred to his house in Wilmington, Delaware, as “the lake house,” saying, “It’s no lake, it’s a pond”. And while he might have forgotten names or dates, he exhibited perfect recall about the layout of his homes, leading a verbal expedition through them for the benefit of Hur, who noted that the president appeared “to have a photographic understanding and recall of the house”.