Biden transcript released as Robert Hur testifies over documents probe: Latest

While Donald Trump confirmed to CNBC that he recently met with Elon Musk, he said he wasn’t sure if the billionaire would support his bid to return to the White House.

“I don’t know. I’ve been friendly with him over the years,” the former president said.

“I’ve helped him. When I was president I helped him. I’ve liked him. We obviously have opposing views on a minor subject called electric cars,” he added. “I’m all for electric cars, but you have to have all the alternatives also.”

Last week, The New York Times reported that Mr Trump and Mr Musk met in private.

Transcripts of President Biden’s two-day interview with Department of Justice investigators shows Mr Biden having far more accurate recall and command of past events than was described in the report authored by Special Counsel Robert Hur.

The transcripts of the interviews, which were conducted on 8 and 9 October of last year, span 268 pages and paint a far more nuanced picture of Mr Biden’s faculties than was depicted by Mr Hur, a former Trump administration appointee who Attorney General Merrick Garland brought on as a special counsel to investigate how classified documents ended up at Mr Biden’s former Washington, DC office and his Wilmington, Delaware home.

In his report, which Mr Garland released last month, Mr Hur stated that he declined to charge Mr Biden for mishandling the documents at issue and said he did not believe a jury could be convinced to convict beyond a reasonable doubt.

But the Republican prosecutor cast the 81-year-old president in an unflattering light, painting him as unable to remember specific dates, such as when his late son, Beau Biden, passed away from brain cancer, and describing him as a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory”.

Republicans have pounced on the allegations to bolster former president Donald Trump’s unfounded claim that Mr Biden is senile and unfit to serve, while Democrats and legal experts criticised Mr Hur for including the extraneous and derogatory information in a memorandum about a person who was not being charged with a crime.

Yet the transcript appears not to match up with how Mr Hur described Mr Biden, particularly with regard to his memory.

On the topic of Beau Biden, the president remembered the exact date of his death, with other people in the room mentioning the year.

“What month did Beau die? Oh God, May 30,” he said.

The exchange took place as Mr Biden was explaining the chronology behind his decision not to seek the presidency in 2016, the year after his son passed away.

A redacted version of the transcript of President Joe Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur has been released.

Mr Hur claimed in his report that Mr Biden didn’t recall, “even within several years, when his son Beau died”.

Beau Biden died in May 2015 from cancer at the age of 46.

Mr Biden shared his fury at Mr Hur’s raising of the issue in the report during a press conference following its release.

But the transcript reveals that Mr Hur didn’t specifically ask about the date of the death of Beau Biden.

Mr Hur did ask about where he stored documents after leaving the vice presidency in January 2017.

“This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?” Mr Biden said, according to the transcript.

“Remember, in this time frame, my son is — either been deployed or is dying, and, and so it was — and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period, except the president,” Mr Biden added, seemingly in reference to leaving the vice presidency, not the senate where he spent 36 years.

It has been reported that Mr Biden was discouraged from running for the top job in 2016 by President Barack Obama, who backed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

“I’m not — and not a mean thing to say. He just thought that she had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did. And so I hadn’t, I hadn’t, at this point — even though I’m at Penn, I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I may run for office again. But if I ran again, I’d be running for president. And, and so what was happening, though — what month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30 —” Mr Biden continued.

White House lawyer Rachel Cotton noted that Beau Biden died in 2015, according to the transcript, as did an unidentified speaker.

Donald Trump claimed steel company leaders cried before him during a call-in interview on CNBC.

“Every person in the steel industry, when they see me, they started crying,” he said.

“They would hug me, they would kiss me, they said: ‘Sir, you saved our industry!’” Mr Trump added.

“I put a very strong 50 per cent tariff on their dumped steel, and, by the way, nothing was perfect, frankly the tariffs should have been higher.”

“This saved the whole industry,” he claimed.

Robert Hur, the former Trump-appointed US Attorney who declined to prosecute President Joe Biden after classified materials were found in his Delaware home and a former office in Washington, DC, will appear before the House Judiciary Committee as a private citizen who has surrounded himself with Republican partisans and notorious figures linked to former president Donald Trump as he prepares for his Tuesday appearance before the House Judiciary Committee.

According to multiple sources familiar with Mr Hur’s plans, the special counsel, who is appearing before the Judiciary Committee at the request of the Republican majority led by Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, has arranged his departure from the Department of Justice to be official as of Monday 11 March, one day before he is scheduled to appear on Capitol Hill.

Instead of appearing as a DOJ employee who is bound by the ethical guidelines which govern the behaviour of federal prosecutors, he will appear as a private citizen with no constraints on his testimony.

A Judiciary Committee source said Mr Hur’s departure from government service the day before he testifies is a major red flag for Democrats on the panel.

“That makes it even more problematic from our perspective … if he was still a federal employee, DOJ would have to approve his testimony and they’d be involved in his appearance tomorrow,” they said.

The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg has more:

President Joe Biden is issuing a budget plan Monday aimed at getting voters’ attention: tax breaks for families, lower health care costs, smaller deficits and higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

Unlikely to pass the House and Senate to become law, the proposal for fiscal 2025 is an election-year blueprint about what the future could hold if Biden and enough of his fellow Democrats win in November. The president and his aides previewed parts of his budget going into last week’s State of the Union address, with plans to provide the fine print on Monday.

If the Biden budget became law, deficits could be pruned $3 trillion over a decade. Parents could get an increased child tax credit. Homebuyers could get a tax credit worth $9,600. Corporate taxes would jump upward, while billionaires would be charged a minimum tax of 25%.

Biden also wants Medicare to have the ability to negotiate prices on 500 prescription drugs, which could save $200 billion over 10 years.

The president is traveling Monday to Manchester, New Hampshire, where he’ll call on Congress to apply his $2,000 cap on drug costs and $35 insulin to everyone, not just people who have Medicare. He’ll also seek to make permanent some protections in the Affordable Care Act that are set to expire next year.

All of this is a chance for Biden to try to define the race on his preferred terms, just as the all-but-certain Republican nominee, Donald Trump, wants to rally voters around his agenda.

“A fair tax code is how we invest in things that make this country great: health care, education, defense and so much more,” Biden said at Thursday’s State of the Union address, adding that his predecessor enacted a $2 trillion tax cut in 2017 that disproportionately benefited the top 1% of earners.

Trump, for his part, would like to increase tariffs and pump out gushers of oil. He called for a “second phase” of tax cuts as parts of his 2017 overhaul of the income tax code would expire after 2025. The Republican has also said he would slash government regulations. He has also pledged to pay down the national debt, though it’s unclear how without him detailing severe spending cuts.

“We’re going to do things that nobody thought was possible,” Trump said after his wins in last week’s Super Tuesday nomination contests.

House Republicans on Thursday voted their own budget resolution for the next fiscal year out of committee, saying it would trim deficits by $14 trillion over 10 years. But their measure would depend on rosy economic forecasts and sharp spending cuts, reducing $8.7 trillion in Medicare and Medicaid expenditures. Biden has pledged to stop any cuts to Medicare.

“The House’s budget blueprint reflects the values of hard-working Americans who know that in tough economic times, you don’t spend what you don’t have — our federal government must do the same,” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Congress is still working on a budget for the current fiscal year. On Saturday, Biden signed into law a $460 billion package to avoid a shutdown of several federal agencies, but lawmakers are only about halfway through addressing spending for this fiscal year.

Former president Donald Trump and President Joe Biden are set to clinch their respective party nominations on Tuesday evening as multiple states hold their primary contests.

Georgia, Washington, Mississippi, the Northern Mariana Islands and Democrats Abroad will all hold primaries, while Hawaii is set to hold a Republican caucus.

Mr Trump’s victory for the Republican nomination and Mr Biden’s sealing of the Democratic nomination are all but guaranteed given that neither have any credible challengers left in the race.

With both candidates poised to clinch their nominations, we are about to move formally from the primary to the general election phase of the 2024 election.

But it’s fair to say we don’t know exactly what that will look like.

Typically at this moment, candidates will shift their message to speak to a broader swath of voters — especially moderates and independents — that play a more influential role in general elections compared to the hardcore base voters that decide primaries.

But if this weekend was any indication, Trump is showing little interest — or ability — to embrace a more inclusive or moderate tone. He’s still falsely insisting that the 2020 election was stolen and praising those who stormed the Capitol on one of the darkest days in modern U.S. history.

We’ll be paying close attention to the tone of his official response — and his social media posts — after he clinches the nomination.

On the Democratic side, we’re about to learn whether Biden’s coalition changes its view of the race as the reality sets in that this election is now a binary choice between Biden and Trump. Biden’s campaign is betting big that’s the case.

On the eve of Tuesday’s primaries, the Democratic president unveiled a new campaign ad as part of a $30 million battleground-state investment casting himself as more effective than Trump — despite concerns about Biden’s age.

Trump won’t make it easy on Biden. A super PAC backing Trump released a new ad that asks, “If Biden wins, can he even survive till 2029?”

Buckle up. The next eight months could get bumpy.