Biden mixes up Mexico and Egypt at dramatic surprise presser to address claims over memory loss: live

Overwhelmed by the 388-page PDF document released by Special Counsel Robert Hur today?

From John Bowden, check out the key takeaways from Mr Hur’s report:

Check out some of the key photos from Robert Hur’s report, from The Independent’s Ariana Baio:

President Joe Biden appeared to confuse Mexico with Egypt, in a press conference on Thursday called to refute allegations of his poor memory.

Mike Bedigan has the full story:

In the wake of the classified documents report from Special Counsel Robert Hur, the president sought to convince voters there were no problems with his memory. Instead, Joe Biden did exactly what his team had been hoping to avoid, writes John Bowden in Washington DC.

Read his full report here:

Bob Bauer, personal counsel to President Joe Biden, criticised the investigation in a statement Thursday.

“The Special Counsel could not refrain from investigative excess, perhaps unsurprising given the intense pressures of the current political environment,” Mr Bauer said in a statement. “Whatever the impact of those pressures on the final Report, it flouts [Department of Justice] regulations and norms.” Mr Bauer also said Mr Biden gave his “unprecedented” cooperation to the investigation.

“The Special Counsel also noted the President’s complete cooperation, including the President’s unprecedented decision to open up every room of his family home and beach house to comprehensive FBI searches as well as a voluntary interview conducted over two days,” Mr Bauer said.

The actual contents of the president’s classified stash appear to have been wholly centred on, in retrospect, one of the key moments of the Obama-Biden administration. In 2009, the Democratic president undertook a controversial decision to surge troops to Afghanistan in the hopes of driving Taliban forces out of the country entirely; a decision which many saw as an about-face given Barack Obama’s campaign promise to end the war in Iraq. Mr Biden was one of the loudest voices against that decision at the time, a view which appears vindicated given the Taliban’s takeover of the country in 2021 after Donald Trump began a withdrawal of US contractors and military forces in the final year of his presidency. And the materials the president “removed from the ordinary flow of paper” at the White House were split into two categories: His own, personal, handwritten notes detailing his thinking at the time; and actual documents marked with clear classification labels. One specific document found by FBI agents was a handwritten memo penned by Mr Biden for then-President Obama summing up his arguments against the 2009 troop surge.

Then-Vice President Joe Biden retained these documents because he saw them as a central part of his legacy in the White House, investigators wrote in the report.

“Mr. Biden had a strong motive to keep the classified Afghanistan documents. He believed President Obama’s 2009 troop surge was a mistake on par with Vietnam. He wanted record to show that he was right about Afghanistan; that his critics were wrong; and that he had opposed President Obama’s mistaken decision forcefully when it was made-that his judgment was sound when it mattered most,” read the Hur report.

But some were stored unceremoniously and in a clearly unsecured fashion in the Biden household, wrote investigators.

Read more about the key takeaways from the report:

President Biden is not the only one to have made Middle-Eastern mix-ups.

Last week, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson appeared to confuse Iran with Israel while appearing live on Meet the Press…