MSNBC host Joe Scarborough on Wednesday doubled down on his claim that President Joe Biden appeared mentally fit before his June debate against President-elect Donald Trump, despite widespread reporting to the contrary.
Special counsel Robert Hur and publications like The Wall Street Journal released reports indicating Biden’s mental acuity was in decline before the debate. Yet Scarborough, on “Morning Joe,” who claimed in March that Biden was at his intellectual peak, continued to assert how “sharp” Biden appeared during his time in office, even as Financial Times columnist Edward Luce contradicted his view.
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“I spent, as I’ve said before, two and a half, three hours with Joe Biden in the White House, all over the White House, talking at length, at length and in depth about foreign policy matters. And he was as sharp as anybody else I’ve spoken to and spoke actually like a man who’s been doing this since he was 29 years old and knew world leaders,” Scarborough said. “Was he slower physically? Yes. Did he occasionally jumble a few words or a few names? Yes. But he corrected those as well. So, after two, two and a half, three hours with him in the White House, going all over the White House, I did not see that.”
“I spoke with French leaders after they had some pretty tough negotiations with him a couple of years ago. They left that meeting surprised how sharp he was and how they had listened to press reports saying that he had lost one, two, three, four steps. They were surprised by the fact that actually he was pressing [French President Emmanuel] Macron on every single issue,” he continued. “I’ve spoken to leaders in the Middle East. I mean, I could go on and on about this.”
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Scarborough acknowledged that he did hear about Biden performing poorly at fundraisers, but suggested that many in Washington, D.C., were not aware of the president’s decline.
“Foreign leaders and foreign governments told me very different things to what you’ve just said. I think that people, you know, who are getting older and have waning energy and vitality can go in and out. They can have strong moments, they can have weak moments,” Luce responded. “I think, though, the key thing here was that the debate last June occurred several days after Biden had been traveling and wasn’t considered to be shocking by a lot of the people I know, you know, in various circles around the White House, that that was the performance that reflected Biden’s mental powers at the time. So I think the American public had it right.”
The majority of voters were concerned about Biden’s mental fitness being insufficient to be president even in 2021.
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Hur found that Biden presented himself to interviewers as an “elderly man with a poor memory” in his February report regarding his investigation into Biden’s retention of classified documents. The special counsel detailed instances where Biden forgot when he was vice president and the year his son Beau Biden passed away.
Dozens of those close to Biden’s operations told the WSJ how aides insulated the president and handled his duties in the years before the June debate.
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Luce published a Tuesday opinion piece alleging there was a “conspiracy of silence around Biden’s waning capacities.”
“Though he was shielded from press conferences and other unscripted events, it was an open secret in Washington that his mind was in decline,” he wrote. “Biden’s inner cabinet of family and longtime aides should take some of the blame.”
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.