Fox & Friends Falsely Claim Special Counsel Report Says Biden Was Not Competent to Stand Trial

Fox & Friends devoted a segment on Friday to the special counsel report on President Joe Biden’s classified documents case, which will not result in criminal charges. However, the right has jumped on one reason cited for not bringing charges, that Biden was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” to claim that it means that Biden is incompetent to stand trial.

Co-hosts Steve Doocy, Lawrence Jones, Ainsley Earhardt, and Brian Kilmeade all echoed the claim by right-leaning commentators and politicians that the statement by special counsel Robert Hur meant that Biden was not competent to even stand trial. This claim was not made by Hur, who wrote the following in his report:

We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.

While this is an unflattering, even damning statement on Biden’s memory, there is no claim by Hur that Biden was considered incompetent to stand trial. However, the hosts still pushed that false claim.

Not surprisingly, the hosts referenced the clip from Biden’s press conference on Thursday in which Fox News White House Correspondent Peter Doocy (the son of Steve Doocy) asked Biden directly if he could “continue as president,” after which other reporters piled on with questions of their own about Biden’s memory. Jones said this only proved that reporters were asking “what everybody’s been saying all along”:

So you can’t just dismiss it as Republican claims or people that are ageist and don’t like the president. This is a special counsel who decided not to charge the president, who also said, “I think it’s important for you guys to know part of the reason why I’m not charging him, because he wouldn’t even be able to stand trial.”

Jones repeated this claim later in the segment, saying, “if he can’t stand before a jury, how can he stand for the American people and be president right now and run for another four years?”

But that’s not what Hur wrote. Hur claimed “it would be difficult to convince a jury” to convict Biden because he presented himself, in Hur’s assessment, “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” That does not mean Biden is mentally incompetent to stand trial, which is an official, legal standard. What Hur actually wrote was that if someone tried prosecuting Biden, they’d look like they were attacking him, that would look bad for the prosecution, would fail to convince the jury, and the prosecution would lose their case. And prosecutors do not want to look like the bad guys, and they especially do not want to lose.

The past 24 hours were, objectively, unhelpful for Biden or his re-election campaign, but Hur’s report was not a legal finding that the President of the United States is mentally incompetent.

Watch the video above via Fox News.