Personal Counsel to President Biden on classified documents

WASHINGTON, D.C. (CBS, KYMA/KECY) - Robert Bauer, Personal Counsel to President Joe Biden, spoke with Face the Nation moderator Margaret Brennan on Sunday about the special counsel report on Biden's handling of classified documents.

"It starts with a legal conclusion that was foregone from the very beginning. The investigation could have been concluded in two or three months. It went on for over 15 months. And so along with a legal conclusion comes this flood of characterizations, factual misstatements, pejorative comments about the President that are inconsistent with DOJ policy and norms. And that, as you see over the last 48 hours have been widely criticized by legal experts. This is not what prosecutors do. It is shoddy work product."

Robert Bauer, Personal Counsel to President Biden

When asked what Attorney General Merrick Garland said when Bauer raised these issues to him, Bauer said, "It's evident that he had committed to make the report public the way that the special counsel had written it. And so that's the report that we have."

Talks then came to President Biden's mental acuity, to which Brennan asked Bauer if Biden has any memory problems. Bauer responded:

"He does not. I was in the interview room. And let me tell you one other vignette from the interview room. There were a couple of occasions when the special counsel, who had flagged at the beginning that sometimes he asks imprecise questions, asked questions that the President picked apart as a matter of logic. He showed that the questions didn't have a logical underpinning. Now, everybody in the room recognized that was the case, that showed the President was listening carefully and understood precisely what was wrong with those questions. I didn't come away from the special counsel's failure to ask precise questions and think to myself, 'He has mental acuity problems.' I just thought he was asking bad questions."

To watch more of Brennan's interview with Bauer, click here.