Top surrogates for President Joe Biden repeated the same talking points for the special counsel report on the president’s mishandling of classified documents, saying Hur’s comments about Biden’s declining mental state were “gratuitous.”
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Biden campaign national co-chair Mitch Landrieu joined Meet the Press on Sunday, defending the president’s mental capacity and attempting to undermine Special Counsel Robert Hur’s determination that the 81-year-old’s memory is “significantly limited.”
“The responsibility of the federal prosecutor is to investigate and learn the facts and apply the law to those facts,” Mayorkas said after a section side-stepping questions about a second upcoming impeachment vote in the House against him. “The special counsel did this in the case, made a conclusion that there is no case — case closed — and then made gratuitous, unnecessary and inaccurate personal remarks and those are improper.”
The embattled Homeland Security secretary explained that he takes extensive measures to prepare for a meeting with Biden because he is “sharp, intensely probing, and detail-oriented, and focused.”
Landrieu, who said Hur “decided to add ad hominem, gratuitous attacks” about Biden’s mental capacity, said he was similarly impressed with the octogenarian’s cognitive acumen.
“This guy’s tough, he’s smart, he’s on his game,” Landrieu said. “When you go in to brief the president, you better have your big boy pants on. And this kind of sense that he’s not ready for this job is a bucket of b.s. that’s so deep your boots would get stuck in it.”
The former New Orleans mayor claimed that Hur’s report concluded that “the president had engaged in no wrongdoing, period, end-of-story.” However, the report did find that Biden had mishandled classified information but stopped short of bringing criminal charges.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Mayorkas’s and Landrieu’s comments come after more than a dozen Republicans called to invoke the 25th Amendment, which allows the president’s Cabinet to remove and replace him. Mayorkas denied any Cabinet member was talking about voting to remove Biden.
On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris also used the word “gratuitous” to describe Hur’s characterization of Biden’s mental state, saying that it was also “politically motivated.” Eric Holder, attorney general in the Obama administration, further repeated the word “gratuitous” on Friday.
