Democratic political consultant Paul Begala panned President Joe Biden's response to a special counsel report questioning his mental fitness, calling the president’s Thursday press conference "terrible for Democrats."
"Look, I'm a Biden supporter," the former adviser to President Bill Clinton said on CNN Friday morning. "And I slept like a baby last night. I woke up every two hours and wet the bed. This is terrible for Democrats. And anybody with a functioning brain knows that."
Begala argued that instead of defending his mental capacity, the president should have gone after former president Donald Trump. "Everything with Biden has to be not ‘I am great,’" Begala said, "but the other guy’s really damaging, dangerous, a threat."
Addressing the special counsel report, Biden said in the Thursday press conference, "There's some attention paid to some language in the report about my recollection of events. There's even reference that I don't remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that?"
Federal investigators claimed in the report that "Biden’s memory was worse" than it has been in years past, noting that in two interviews with investigators the 81-year-old president "did not remember when he was vice president" or "remember, within several years, when his son Beau died."
"I'm well-meaning and I'm an elderly man, and I know what the hell I'm doing," an infuriated Biden told reporters, referring to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s claim that charges should not be levied against Biden because a jury would consider the president "a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."
The president went on to clash with a Fox News reporter who asked how bad his memory was, telling the reporter that "my memory is so bad I let you speak."
Biden lawyer Robert Bauer sent the special counsel a letter denouncing his report’s findings about the president. "We do not believe that the report's treatment of President Biden's memory is accurate or appropriate," Bauer wrote. "The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events."