Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday slammed special counsel Robert Hur's damaging report on a classified documents investigation and its claims concerning President Joe Biden's mental acuity as "gratuitous" and "politically motivated."
"What I saw in that report last night I believe is, as a former prosecutor, the comments that were made by that prosecutor gratuitous, inaccurate, and inappropriate," Harris told a reporter Friday, CNN reported.
Hur, the special counsel investigating Biden in connection with the removal and storage of classified documents, cleared the president of any wrongdoing but caused potentially more political damage for his reelection campaign with his documentation of the president's alleged memory problems and other issues associated with his age.
Biden, 81, has already been facing concerns about such issues and whether they would keep him from fulfilling the duties of his office. On Thursday, the president angrily said the report's claims are false.
Harris pushed back against concerns on Biden's age, using the White House's response to the Hamas attacks on Israel last Oct. 7 as an example.
She said she was in "almost every meeting" with Biden and his national security team in the days after the Hamas assault and said the president sat with Hur for the interviews recounted in the report on Oct. 8 and 9.
"The president was in front of and on top of it all, asking questions and requiring that America's military and intelligence community and diplomatic community would figure out and know how many people are dead, how many Americans, how many hostages ... is the situation stable?" Harris said.
Biden also was "coordinating and directing leaders who are in charge of America's national security, not to mention our allies around the globe," said Harris.
She further questioned Hur's integrity.
"The way that the president's demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and [was] clearly politically motivated, gratuitous," Harris said. "When it comes to the role and responsibility of a prosecutor in a situation like that, we should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity of what we saw."