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    Biden’s Interview With Hur Confirms What Many Suspected

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    The former president’s halting responses to questions by a special counsel show him exactly as a majority of Americans believed him to be — and as Democrats repeatedly insisted he was not.For much of his time in the White House, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. offered a quick rebuttal to those raising concerns about his age: “Watch me,” he said.Yet, in the end, it may be the sound of Mr. Biden’s own voice that proves what his aides worked furiously, and spent hundreds of millions of campaign dollars, to try to keep the public from seeing with its own eyes.The five-hour-and-10-minute audio recording of a special counsel’s interview with Mr. Biden on Oct. 8 and 9, 2023, shows a president struggling to recall dates and details, whose thoughts seem jumbled as he tries to recreate events that had occurred just a few years earlier.The information in the audio recording, which Axios published on Saturday, is not new. The 258-page transcript of the interview of Mr. Biden by Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated his handling of classified documents, was released in March 2024. His report set off a political firestorm in the midst of the president’s re-election campaign.But the sound of Mr. Biden’s fragile voice and unsteady responses offers a revelation of its own. The Hur tapes reveal the president exactly as a majority of Americans believed him to be — and as Democrats repeatedly insisted he was not.In the days after Mr. Hur released his report, Democrats fanned out across the news media to vouch for the president, assuring the public of their eyewitness vantage point on his deep knowledge and sure-handed command of the nation and the world. He was “sharp” and at the “top of his game,” they said almost in unison. He was “focused, impressive, formidable and effective,” as Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, one of the youngest leading Democrats, put it memorably. Biden administration officials declined to release the audio recording of his interview, asserting executive privilege.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Audio of Special Counsel Interview Adds to Renewed Debate of Biden’s Fitness as President

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      A 2023 audio recording released by Axios comes on the heels of other recent disclosures that have prompted recriminations among Democrats over their handling of the matter.A 2023 audio recording of President Joseph R. Biden Jr. speaking haltingly and having memory lapses is the latest in a series of recent disclosures that have reopened a debate over Mr. Biden’s physical and mental fitness while in office and prompted fresh recriminations among Democrats.The recording, released by the news outlet Axios on Friday night, documents a four-minute portion of Mr. Biden’s interview with Robert K. Hur, a special counsel who investigated his handling of classified information.Mr. Hur had concluded early last year that “no criminal charges” were warranted in the case. But in clearing the president, Mr. Hur portrayed Mr. Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory,” based off an hourslong interview with the president, inflaming concerns that Mr. Biden’s fitness for office had significantly declined.The audio clip did not reveal new exchanges between Mr. Hur and Mr. Biden. But it gives a fuller picture of why Mr. Hur described Mr. Biden as he did, capturing the president’s whispery voice and the long pauses in his speech. Trump administration officials plan to release the audio, according to two people familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe a decision that has yet to be announced.The audio clip comes as a forthcoming book — written by Jake Tapper of CNN and Alex Thompson of Axios — has provided new details on Mr. Biden’s mental and physical decline and chronicled how Mr. Biden’s advisers stamped out discussion of his age-related limitations. Among other issues, the book recounts Mr. Biden forgetting the names of longtime aides and allies, and outsiders who had not seen the president in some time being shocked at his appearance.Top Democrats who closed ranks to defend Mr. Biden in his moment of crisis and vouched for his fitness for office have now had to rationalize those statements. In an interview on the “Talk Easy With Sam Fragoso” podcast last month, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — who had urged Mr. Biden to remain in the race to the end — visibly struggled not to laugh when the host asked if the president had at the time been “as sharp as you.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Expands Attacks on Law Firms, Singling Out Paul, Weiss

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      President Trump on Friday opened a third attack against a private law firm, restricting the business activities of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison just days after a federal judge ruled such measures appeared to violate the Constitution.White House officials said the president signed an executive order to suspend security clearances held by people at the firm, pending a review of whether such clearances are consistent with the national interest. The order also seeks to sharply limit Paul, Weiss employees from entering government buildings, getting government jobs or receiving any money from federal contracts, according to a fact sheet provided by the Trump administration.The text of the order was not immediately available, but a White House fact sheet said the order intended to punish the firm generally, and one of its former lawyers specifically, Mark F. Pomerantz.Mr. Trump mentioned Mr. Pomerantz by name in an angry speech Friday at the Justice Department, where he complained about prosecutors and private lawyers who pursued cases against him, calling them “really bad people.” Mr. Trump, in the same speech, claimed he was ending the “weaponization” of the Justice Department, though his move against the firm showed he will continue using his power to exact retribution on his opponents.Mr. Pomerantz had tried to build a criminal case against Mr. Trump several years ago when he worked at the Manhattan district attorney’s office. The White House announcement called Mr. Pomerantz “an unethical lawyer” who tried to “manufacture a prosecution against President Trump.”A spokesperson for the firm said in a written statement that Mr. Pomerantz retired from the firm in 2012 and had not been affiliated with it for years.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Fact-Checking Trump’s Justice Dept. Speech on Crime, Immigration and His Cases

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      President Trump repeated a number of well-trodden falsehoods on Friday in a grievance-fueled speech at the Justice Department, veering from prepared remarks to single out lawyers and prosecutors and assail the criminal investigations into him.His remarks, billed as a policy address, were wide-ranging, touching on immigration, crime and the price of eggs.Here’s a fact-check.Mr. Trump’s misleading claims touched on:His legal troublesThe 2020 electionBiden and classified documentsThe Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the CapitolParents, anti-abortion activists and CatholicsImmigration and crimeEgg pricesHis legal troublesWhat Was Said“They weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people.”“They spied on my campaign, launched one hoax and disinformation operation after another, broke the law on a colossal scale, persecuted my family, staff and supporters, raided my home Mar-a-Lago and did everything within their power to prevent me from becoming the president of the United States.”This lacks evidence. Mr. Trump’s claims refer to a wide array of investigations and criminal cases that occurred before, during and after his first term as president.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      F.B.I. Returns Materials Taken From Mar-a-Lago to Trump

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      Among the items taken from the president’s Florida residence were files that investigators said contained classified material and formed the central evidence in one of the criminal cases against him.The F.B.I. on Friday gave President Trump the boxes of materials the bureau had seized during a search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in 2022, the White House announced.Files that investigators said contained classified material were among the thousands of items taken in the search, and they had formed the central evidence in a criminal case charging Mr. Trump with illegally taking them when he left office after his first term and blocking the government’s efforts to retrieve them.But a judge unexpectedly threw out the charges last year, and prosecutors dropped their appeal to reinstate them after Mr. Trump was re-elected in November. Jack Smith, the special counsel in the case, said at the time that the charges had been dismissed because of a department policy that barred filing charges against a sitting president.Mr. Trump repeatedly argued that he had a legal right to the documents despite their classification. After the case was dropped, the president and his allies said they would seek the return of the files that had been seized.Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said that happened Friday afternoon.“The F.B.I. is giving the president his property back that was taken during the unlawful and illegal raids,” Mr. Cheung said. “We are taking possession of the boxes today and loading them onto Air Force One.”Mr. Cheung told reporters that the boxes of materials taken from Mar-a-Lago were loaded onto Air Force One before the president’s departure for Mar-a-Lago on Friday evening. Alina Habba, the counselor to the president, told reporters that the boxes included personal items from Mr. Trump and his family.In his own statement, the president said he wanted to make the materials “part of the Trump Presidential Library.”“The Department of Justice has just returned the boxes that deranged Jack Smith made such a big deal about,” he said, adding, “I did absolutely nothing wrong.” More

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      End of Trump Cases Leaves Limits on Presidential Criminality Unclear

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      Donald J. Trump is set to regain office without clarity on the scope of presidential immunity and with a lingering cloud over whether outside special counsels can investigate high-level wrongdoing.The end of the two federal criminal cases against President-elect Donald J. Trump on Monday left momentous, unsettled questions about constraints on criminal wrongdoing by presidents, from the scope of presidential immunity to whether the Justice Department may continue to appoint outside special counsels to investigate high-level wrongdoing.Both cases against Mr. Trump — for his attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his later hoarding of classified government documents and obstruction of efforts to retrieve them — were short-circuited by the fact that he won the 2024 election before they could be definitively resolved.Jack Smith, the special counsel who brought both cases against Mr. Trump, asked courts on Monday to shut them down. The prosecutor cited the Justice Department’s longstanding view that the Constitution implicitly grants temporary immunity to sitting presidents, lest any prosecution distract them from their official duties.The result is not just that Mr. Trump appears set to escape any criminal accountability for his actions. (Mr. Smith left the door open to, in theory, refiling the charges after Mr. Trump leaves office, but the statute of limitations is likely to have run by then.) It also means that two open constitutional questions the cases have raised appear likely to go without definitive answers as Mr. Trump takes office.One is the extent of the protection from prosecution offered to former presidents by the Supreme Court’s ruling this summer establishing that they have a type of broad but not fully defined immunity for official acts taken while in office.The other is whether, when a president is suspected of committing crimes, the Justice Department can avoid conflicts of interest by bringing in an outside prosecutor to lead a semi-independent investigation into the matter.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Secret Files in Election Case Show How Judges Limited Trump’s Privilege

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      The partly unsealed rulings, orders and transcripts open a window on a momentous battle over grand jury testimony that played out in secret, creating important precedents about executive privilege.Court documents unsealed on Monday shed new light on a legal battle over which of former President Donald J. Trump’s White House aides had to testify before a grand jury in Washington that charged him with plotting to overturn the 2020 election, showing how judges carved out limits on executive privilege.The trove — including motions, judicial orders and transcripts of hearings in Federal District Court in Washington — did not reveal significant new details about Mr. Trump’s efforts to cling to power. But it did open a window on important questions of presidential power and revealed how judges grew frustrated with Mr. Trump’s longstanding strategy of seeking to delay accountability for his attempts to overturn his defeat to Joseph R. Biden Jr.The documents also created important — if not binding — precedents about the scope of executive privilege that could influence criminal investigations in which a current or former president instructs subordinates not to testify before a grand jury based on his constitutional authority to keep certain internal executive branch communications secret.Starting in the summer of 2022, and continuing with the appointment of Jack Smith as special counsel later that year, the Justice Department undertook a wide-ranging and extraordinary effort to compel grand jury testimony from several close aides to Mr. Trump. Prosecutors believed the aides had critical information about the former president’s attempts to overturn the results of the election.The effort, which ended in the spring of the following year, was largely intended to obtain firsthand accounts from key figures who had used claims of executive privilege and other legal protections to avoid testifying to investigators on the House committee that examined the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the events leading up to it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump Rally in Michigan Dominated by More False Statements

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      Former President Donald J. Trump held a rally on Thursday in the key battleground state of Michigan that was notable mainly for his continued false statements and exaggerations on a number of subjects as varied as the 2020 election and the federal government’s response to Hurricane Helene.In the roughly 85 minutes that Mr. Trump was onstage, he repeated a pattern of untrue assertions that have characterized many of his events as the 2024 presidential race heads into its final weeks. The crowd of supporters in Saginaw County, which he narrowly lost four years ago, included Mike Rogers, the former Michigan congressman and the Republican candidate for Michigan’s open Senate seat, and Pete Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican Party chairman.Mr. Trump reiterated his familiar false claim that he had won the 2020 election and made no acknowledgment of new evidence that was unsealed against him on Wednesday in the federal election subversion case. He also said his campaign was up in all polls in every swing state, while several public polls show close races and Vice President Kamala Harris leading narrowly in a number of battlegrounds.Mr. Trump also mischaracterized the state of funding at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, saying that the Biden administration had stolen disaster-relief money allocated to the agency to give to housing for undocumented immigrants so they would vote for Democrats.He cast electric cars as a threat to the auto industry, while at the same time praising Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive who has endorsed his candidacy and featured him prominently on X, the Musk-owned social media platform.Michigan was one of a handful of swing states where Mr. Trump and his allies tried to overturn his defeat in 2020 through a series of maneuvers that included breaching voting equipment and seeking to seat a set of fake presidential electors. Some of his supporters have been criminally charged in the state, where Mr. Trump was named as an unindicted co-conspirator this year.Mr. Trump spent time in his speech taking satisfaction over his choice of running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, whose debate performance this week was applauded by many.“I drafted the best athlete,” Mr. Trump said of Mr. Vance. The audience — several thousand supporters at a recreation center at Saginaw Valley State University, roughly 100 miles north of Detroit — cheered.And he mused, at one point, that instead of being on a beach in Monte Carlo or someplace else, he was running for the presidency again. “If I had my choice of being here with you today or being on some magnificent beach with the waves hitting me in the face, I would take you every single time.”Overall as of Thursday, Ms. Harris led by two percentage points in Michigan, according to The New York Times’s polling average, 49 percent to 47 percent. The vice president is scheduled to return to the state on Friday, campaigning in Detroit and Flint. More

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      ‘Signs of Scorching Prejudice’ Doomed the Case Against Alec Baldwin for ‘Rust’ Shooting

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      A high-pressure manslaughter case against a movie star turned into an interrogation of the prosecution’s conduct.While dismissing the involuntary manslaughter case against Alec Baldwin on Friday, the judge did not hold back.She delivered a searing criticism of the prosecution and state law enforcement officials who oversaw the case, declaring that they had intentionally and deliberately withheld from the defense evidence related to the fatal shooting on the set of the film “Rust.”“If this conduct does not rise to the level of bad faith, it certainly comes so near to bad faith as to show signs of scorching prejudice,” Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer said.The judge’s decision to end the case against Mr. Baldwin — without the option for the prosecutors to revive it — was the conclusion of a shocking day at the Santa Fe County Courthouse, in which a high-pressure trial against a movie star turned into an interrogation of the prosecution’s conduct. And it came after a series of missteps by different teams of prosecutors left Mr. Baldwin in legal limbo for more than two years.Shortly before the case was thrown out, the lead prosecutor, Kari T. Morrissey, took the unusual step of calling herself to the witness stand to defend how she handled the situation when a batch of live rounds with a possible connection to the “Rust” shooting was brought to the local sheriff’s office in March.Law enforcement officials testified on Friday that they had inventoried the evidence under a separate case number from other “Rust” evidence. Defense lawyers said they were not told about the ammunition despite asking for all ballistic evidence in the case.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More