Politico

Democrats had a forceful message for the Biden campaign amid the special counsel report fallout: It’s time to flood the zone.

Top party operatives are warning Biden aides that the president cannot retreat in response to the special counsel report that fueled concerns over his age and mental faculties. They say President Joe Biden, having largely shied away from interviews and press conferences, needs to be out in public far more.

They want to see him engage with the press and voters in the off-script and punchy exchanges he’s been known for in the past, which they believe will help chip away at concerns about the president’s mental acuity. They say that it’s worth the risk of potential slip-ups that could reinforce the image that he’s declining.

There have been several of those stumbles this week, with the 81-year-old Biden appearing to refer to two deceased European leaders as living statesmen. In his fiery Thursday night remarks, Biden also grew remarkably combative at times. More superficially, at one point he accidentally referred to Mexico in a comment plainly describing Egypt.

But Democrats say that resolving fears about Biden’s age requires getting him out in front of the country much more, even if there is risk involved. There’s hope, in certain circles, that the report prompts a strategic change at the White House and leads to a more visible, livelier version of Biden.

“What we saw [Thursday] night was so rare, because we don’t get too many of these moments and opportunities where he’s off script, and he’s engaged in the back and forth, particularly in a prime-time setting,” said Faiz Shakir, Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign manager.

Alan Patricof, a venture capitalist and Democratic donor, encouraged Biden to engage the country more — though Patricof, at 89, also defended the president’s age.

“He’s going to have to come a little bit out of his shell and be more available, whether it’s press conferences or traveling around and meeting with people,” Patricof said.

A major Biden donor, South Carolina attorney Dick Harpootlian, said he would encourage the president to gear up for a likely Donald Trump rematch on the debate stage: “We oughta engage in it as much as we can.”

Democrats have long fretted that Biden’s low public profile at times was feeding the criticism about his fitness for office, allowing a caricature of the president to take hold in place of the real thing. But the Hur report has quickly turned those fears into pleas for a new approach. Members of the party say Biden appearances are increasingly vital in assuring voters that his critics’ claims about his mental fitness are unfounded.

“Voters are going to see and hear from the president a lot over the next nine months and they’re more inclined to use their own eyes and ears than to look to this report, but it’s something that raises the stakes for the campaign to prove the opposite is happening,” said a Democratic pollster granted anonymity to speak openly about the topic.

“Voters are weighing what they feel is one risk — Trump, where the risk is obvious — with another risk, which is a president in decline.”

Biden allies and aides were furious on Friday, believing that Hur’s report describing Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with poor memory” was gratuitous, extending well beyond his purview of determining wrongdoing or not in regard to his handling of classified material.

White House Counsel spokesperson Ian Sams at Friday’s briefing called them “inappropriate criticisms” that were “flatly inconsistent with long-standing DOJ traditions.”

Biden delivered an impassioned response and even took questions from reporters Thursday night. Even with the Sisi gaffe, some Democrats believe the president and his top aides should seek to directly combat their critics, as Biden did during those remarks.

Biden allies and the White House press corps have been frustrated that the president’s aides have restricted Biden’s formal exchanges with the press. Though Biden often has shorter, unscripted engagements, he’s done fewer press conferences than his predecessors and often avoids opportunities to engage with the media when foreign leaders come to the White House.

The president has held 33 press conferences in his first three years, compared with Barack Obama’s 66 and Trump’s 52 in the same three-year span, according to University of California Santa Barbara’s The American Presidency Project.

Former Hillary Clinton adviser Philippe Reines said that scarcity of engagement is what prompts a media firestorm when the president does ultimately have a slip up, as he’s prone to do. Trump, who at 77 is just four years younger than Biden, repeatedly makes gaffes of his own. But they often don’t gain as much traction because of how visible he is in the media.

“I would flood the zone, and I felt the same with Hillary [Clinton]. Because if you don’t, then the smallest thing becomes too easy for people and the media to focus on,” Reines said. “The answer to the president is not to put him out there zero times to prevent zero things. It’s to go out there, and have him say whatever it is.”

The Biden campaign doesn’t disagree with the assessment that Biden should be in public more in an election year, which is why they’ve ramped up campaign events and travel across the country. But officials note that it will look different than in past cycles in part because of Americans’ sagging engagement with political news and traditional candidate forums such as debates and town halls.

“I spend a lot of time looking at media consumption studies,” said Pat Dennis, the president of American Bridge 21st Century, a top Democratic superPAC. “And the way you’re going to be deploying a candidate in 2024 is not going to look the same as the way you’re deploying a candidate in 2000 or 2004.”

That’s why there’s been an effort from the Biden campaign to meet people where they are, while tapping into Biden’s strengths as a retail politician. They’ve used social media to highlight these small-scale and intimate conversations with voters, capturing millions of views on TikTok and other platforms where an increasing number of Americans are consuming news.

The campaign believes that these moments, including when one Detroit resident rode in the Beast and spoke with CNN about the president’s sharpness, can at times be more impactful in beating back concerns about the president’s age than a news conference with the White House press corps.

Democrats don’t dispute the value of this type of voter engagement, particularly for a president who’s known for his ability to connect with people in intimate settings. But, even still, they felt Thursday’s prime time press conference had its own benefits, as networks carried a fired-up Biden, embracing the attacks about his age head-on.

“He has the right to be angry, and I think it’s good that he showed his anger to the American people,” said a Democratic strategist, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the dynamic. “I hope that they do more of this, and my guess is, I think they will because he’s the president and when he feels like he’s got something to say to the American people, he’s going to go out there and do it.”

Elena Schneider, Hailey Fuchs and Lauren Egan contributed to this report. 

President Joe Biden needs to do more to reassure Americans concerned about his age and acuity, The New York Times editorial board argued Friday.

The editorial published online warned that the president is “hiding, or worse, being hidden” from the American people — and the Trump campaign is taking advantage of the opportunity to attack the president.

The editorial board wrote that Biden had “less substantive, unscripted interaction with the public and the press than any other president in recent memory.”

The Biden administration’s strategy to connect with Americans has relied on social media influencers rather than public exposures where voters may challenge him, the piece argued. This, along with Biden’s age, has flooded the public with doubt, the editorial board stated.

At 81, the Democratic incumbent is the oldest person to serve as president and to run for reelection. The editorial further pointed out that more than 70 percent of swing state voters agreed that Biden is “just too old to be an effective president,” according to a Times/Siena poll conducted in November.

Biden faced renewed criticism following a contentious news conference broadcast from the White House on Thursday night that was supposed to mitigate concerns about his acuity following the special counsel’s report into classified documents stored at his home.

“His assurances, in other words, didn’t work,” the editorial said of Biden’s news conference. “He must do better — the stakes in this presidential election are too high for Mr. Biden to hope that he can skate through a campaign with the help of teleprompters and aides and somehow defeat as manifestly unfit an opponent as Donald Trump, who has a very real chance of retaking the White House.”

Joe Biden has told aides and outside advisers that Attorney General Merrick Garland did not do enough to rein in a special counsel report stating that the president had diminished mental faculties, according to two people close to the president, as White House frustration with the head of the Justice Department grows.

The report from special counsel Robert Hur ultimately cleared Biden of any charges stemming from his handling of classified documents that were found at Biden’s think tank and his home. But Hur’s explanation for not bringing charges — that Biden would have persuaded the jury that he was a forgetful old man — upended the presidential campaign and infuriated the White House.

Biden and his closest advisers believe Hur went well beyond his purview and was gratuitous and misleading in his descriptions, according to those two people, who were granted anonymity to speak freely. And they put part of the blame on Garland, who they say should have demanded edits to Hur’s report, including around the descriptions of Biden’s faltering memory.

In White House meetings, aides have questioned why Garland felt the need to appoint a special counsel in the first place, though Biden has publicly said he supported the decision.

While Biden himself has not weighed in on Garland’s future, most of the president’s senior advisers do not believe that the attorney general would remain in his post for a possible second term, according to the two people.

“This has been building for a while,” said one of those people. “No one is happy”

Frustration within the White House at Garland has been growing steadily.

Last year, Biden privately denounced how long the probe into his son was taking, telling aides and outside allies that he believed the stress could send Hunter Biden spiraling back into addiction, according to the same two people. And the elder Biden, the people said, told those confidants that Garland should not have eventually empowered a special counsel to look into his son, believing that he again was caving to outside pressure.

In recent weeks, President Biden has grumbled to aides and advisers that had Garland moved sooner in his investigation into former President Donald Trump’s election interference, a trial may already be underway or even have concluded, according to two people granted anonymity to discuss private matters. That trial still could take place before the election and much of the delay is owed not to Garland but to deliberate resistance put up by the former president and his team.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice declined to comment. But one former senior Justice Department official noted that some of the frustrations being directed at Garland are better directed toward the White House. The president’s team had the option to exert executive privilege over elements of Hur’s report but declined to do so. And had Garland made edits to the report, he would have had to explain those redactions to Congress.

Beyond that, Garland felt the need to appoint a special counsel in the classified documents case in part because the president’s team bungled when the first documents were discovered.

“The way in which the White House story kept changing at the outset made it much more difficult for the Justice Department to resist having a special counsel,” said the former official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Had there been a very clear story at the beginning, it would have been easier.”

Biden picked Garland as his attorney general with the stated desire to restore a semblance of independence at the Department of Justice that he and others believed was lost under Donald Trump. He announced the nomination the day after the Jan. 6 attacks at the Capital — a backdrop that Biden offered up as proof that someone of Garland’s stature and temperament was needed in the post.

“Your loyalty is not to me,” Biden said. “You won’t work for me. You are not the president or the vice president’s lawyer.”

Democrats close to Biden fear Garland has become too consumed by that instruction to appear impartial.

“What Democrats do is they bend over backwards not to look partisan, and then they end up hiring people that are partisan but in the other direction,” said a Biden donor, granted anonymity to speak freely about the top law enforcement official in the country. “There’s no question in my mind that the villain here is Merrick Garland.”

Justice Department officials say Garland has delivered on a number of fronts — many of them closely identified with Biden or his priorities. Soon after arriving, he announced reorganizations and new initiatives aimed at cracking down on a wave of violent crime that beset many cities in the wake of the pandemic. There are signs those efforts are bearing fruit.

Garland and his deputies have also reinvigorated federal law enforcement in areas Republican administrations often downplay: fighting to preserve abortion access in the wake of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, aggressively investigating claims of civil rights violations by police, and filing a flurry of often successful cases opposing mergers and alleged monopolistic practices.

But it has been his handling of the overtly political cases that has prompted Democratic agitation. And chief among those decisions now is his selection of Hur, a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, to oversee the classified documents case.

“I had refused to criticize him but appointing Hur, who is obviously a Republican tool and who issued what I think is an irresponsible report which violates DOJ standards, was a mistake,” said Robert Shrum, a longtime consultant in the Democratic Party. “I think Garland will be criticized by historians. We’ve had some terrific attorneys general and some not so good attorneys general. And I think he’s going to rank in the not so good.”

Biden, for his part, has kept his frustrations with Garland private, even after publicly admonishing Hur in a press conference on Thursday for saying he couldn’t remember the year his son Beau died. On Friday, the White House distributed a list of quotes critical of Hur that did not mention Garland. Senate Democrats, questioned about Garland on Friday, declined to weigh in on his tenure.

“I’m not gonna get into criticizing the attorney general at all,” Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) told POLITICO.

Asked on Friday whether the president had confidence in Garland, Ian Sams, a White House spokesperson for oversight and investigations, noted Biden’s comments from the day before saying he supported the appointment of a special counsel.

But even as the frictions between the White House and DOJ remain relatively contained, outside Democrats are now openly airing their disapproval with Garland’s conduct, and their fears that his selection as attorney general may end up being fatal for Biden.

“Garland is far and away Biden’s worst appointee by an order of magnitude,” Robert Kuttner, co-founder of the liberal American Prospect. “And we all pay the price. If Biden goes down the drain because Garland has mishandled the investigation of Trump and gave Republicans a weapon … then the country pays the price. It’s not just that Biden gets punished for the stupidity of appointing Garland.”

Josh Gerstein and Anthony Adragna contributed to this report.

The White House is livid over the Justice Department’s release of a special counsel report that painted a devastating portrait of Joe Biden. But Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to release it was a foregone conclusion — and anything short of publicizing the full report would have been worse.

Technically, the report from special counsel Robert Hur on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents is considered confidential under DOJ rules. Hur even labeled it as such.

In practice, though, burying or censoring the report would have been untenable, former Justice Department leaders say.

They described a high-stakes calculus for both Garland and Hur informed by previous politically sensitive investigations: Special counsel reports have always been made public in recent years, and Garland would have been slammed by Republicans and the press if he tried to keep this one under wraps. Hur, meanwhile, clearly understood that political reality, so the harsh language he included was exactly what he expected the public to see.

The result on Thursday was a public 345-page document, bearing the Justice Department’s imprimatur, that described the president as embarrassingly, and perhaps dangerously, forgetful. Hur’s allies say he needed to include the details about Biden’s mental state because such judgments are critical to decisions about whether to prosecute for these sorts of crimes.

“I just think it’s a question of the compelling public interest at the time, and Garland having to bow to that,” said former Attorney General Bill Barr, referring to the decision to release Hur’s report. “Can you really draw the line and say, ‘I’m not going to put this out,’ without having people even more suspicious? That’s almost as bad as letting it out. At that point, your options are very limited.”

In 2019, Barr’s decision to release the largely unredacted report of special counsel Robert Mueller helped paint a damaging picture of Donald Trump’s embrace of Russian interference in the 2016 election, despite Mueller’s decision not to recommend criminal charges.

But before he released the Mueller report, Barr infuriated Trump’s detractors by sharing his own analysis of its conclusions. Garland eschewed that tack. Instead, he simply released the full document, letting it stand on its own.

Still, releasing it at all was Garland’s decision, noted Barr’s former deputy, Rod Rosenstein, particularly because Hur recommended no charges against anyone involved. Rosenstein noted that prosecutors regularly write documents explaining their decisions not to bring charges. And those documents are typically kept secret.

“Rob Hur didn’t issue a public report,” Rosenstein said. “He wrote a confidential internal memo. Attorney General Garland made the decision to release it.”

Many Justice Department veterans saw that outcome as inevitable, though. Garland had already committed, in a statement last year, to publicize all special counsel reports to the greatest extent possible. And Biden’s White House opted not to assert executive privilege over any portion of Hur’s report.

The report recommended against charging Biden, arguing that his forgetfulness — even about the dates of his vice presidency or the year of his son’s death — would make it difficult to prove in court that he had criminal intent when he accumulated classified documents at his residence. Hur adorned that description with a cutting assessment of his own interview with Biden, saying the president came across as “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”

Biden’s attorneys lashed Hur — in a letter appended to the report — for including those references, and they contended that Hur exhibited bias against Biden for attributing his forgetfulness to age, while taking a more understanding tone toward other witnesses who forgot details from years-old events.

Biden himself complained about Hur’s report Thursday evening for invoking his son’s death and whether Biden remembered it clearly. “How the hell dare he raise that?” the president said of Hur.

Other Justice Department veterans and Biden allies described the report as “gratuitous,” particularly his remark that challenged Biden’s memory of the timing of his son Beau’s death.

“Mr. Hur seems to have gone beyond the limits of what he can write by adding what appear to be simply unnecessary comments about the president’s age and memory, especially the gratuitously bold assertion about forgetting when his son passed,” said Gene Rossi, a former federal prosecutor.

Jamie Gorelick, a deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton, agreed.

“The language that Hur used, I thought, was remarkable and unfortunate,” Gorelick said. “I think he could have listed his reasons for not recommending a charge or not charging without that kind of gratuitous slam.”

Democrats on Capitol Hill largely rallied to Biden’s defense too, accusing Hur of grandstanding and disrespecting Biden.

Some compared it to a 2016 episode when then-FBI Director James Comey announced a decision not to charge Hillary Clinton with mishandling classified information — only to hold a press conference at which he accused her of being irresponsible with national security secrets. Comey earned a scolding from a Justice Department watchdog for that move.

One of Comey’s top allies and advisers from his FBI days acknowledged the parallels between Garland and Hur’s decision and the former FBI director’s, calling it part of a “new, perhaps regrettable, reality.”

“Sad to say, we also regularly find ourselves presented with situations where the legitimacy of a prosecutor’s decision not to charge a politician, police officer or other public figure turns on the explanation she gives,” said Daniel Richman, now a professor at Columbia University. “The norm of never going beyond a simple ‘no’ will often not cut it, especially when a declination will usually be spun as a full exoneration or a whitewash, and the possibility of congressional hearings looms large.”

While the DOJ regulations used to appoint special counsels call for their final reports to be confidential and Hur labeled his as such, in recent years it has become customary for attorneys general — facing political pressure — to vow to release them publicly to the extent the law allows.

Despite the caterwauling from the White House this week, the conclusion of Hur’s probe was sure to draw a flurry of Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits from news organizations and Biden’s political foes. House Republicans could also have subpoenaed the report and related records. The letter Biden’s lawyers sent to Hur indicates transcripts exist of the prosecutor’s interviews with Biden, so the memory lapses Hur cited may have become public whether Hur had colorfully characterized them or not.

Special counsels, by their nature, often operate on politically explosive terrain. They’re typically appointed in high-stakes cases where Justice Department processes might be perceived as politically biased. That drives extraordinary public interest in their final reports. And without exception, special counsel reports of the last five years have become public with few limitations.

Barr drew a sharp contrast between Hur and Mueller, noting that Mueller’s final report made no recommendation on whether or not Trump should be charged with obstruction of justice for trying to sideline the investigation altogether. In explaining his non-decision, Mueller cited the Justice Department’s long-standing prohibition on prosecuting sitting presidents. He punted the decision to Barr, who concluded no charges would have been appropriate even if a president could be charged while in office.

Hur, however, took the opposite approach. In the first two sentences of his report, he said Biden shouldn’t face charges even if DOJ policy allowed them.

Barr praised Hur’s finality. And he said it necessitated Hur’s description of Biden’s mental state. In the report, Hur cited Biden’s apparently faulty memory as a reason jurors might conclude he just forgot to return classified documents, rather than deliberately hoarding them.

“He didn’t do what Mueller was properly criticized for, which was not reaching a decision and just throwing this stuff out,” Barr said. “He reached a decision, and the mental state was an integral part of that.”

And while some Justice Department veterans said the buck stops with Garland, others argued that the attorney general had no choice but to release the report Hur delivered. Hur and his team likely would have understood that their words would become public, even though the report was labeled “confidential.”

“Mr. Hur’s report had to be released unedited lest the attorney general were to be accused of protecting President Biden,” Rossi said.

Gorelick said that under the circumstances it would have been “very hard not to” release Hur’s report, but that the better policy is for such reports to remain secret.

“I would say any report should be confidential,” she said. “You make a charging decision or not and that should be the end of it.”

The debate over publishing the reports by independent prosecutors dates back to the 1980s, when critics of the independent counsel law then in effect complained that those prosecutors’ reports could amount to character assassination.

“There’s just a history of mischief,” Gorelick said. “There’s just too many ways in which what happened yesterday can happen.”

By the 1990s, many liberals joined in the chorus of criticism of the law as Clinton’s administration faced seven such investigations, including the Whitewater probe. Congress let the law expire in 1999, prompting the Justice Department to issue the regulations for special counsels that remain in effect today.

Among those who raised concerns about such reports was Brett Kavanaugh, who served as a prosecutor on Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s staff and now sits on the Supreme Court. (Kavanaugh left open the idea, though, of a report to Congress about possible impeachable offenses.)

“As a general proposition, a public report is a mistake,” Kavanaugh wrote in a 1998 law review article. “It violates the basic norm of secrecy in criminal investigations, it adds time and expense to the investigation, and it often is perceived as a political act. It also misconceives the goals of the criminal process.”

Democratic strategist and former Clinton advisor Paul Begala issued a warning to Democrats after the release of a special counsel report that questioned President Joe Biden’s memory.

“Look, I’m a Biden supporter. 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,” said Begala, who was a chief strategist to the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign and later served as an adviser to President Bill Clinton in the White House, in an appearance Friday on CNN.

Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report, which was released Thursday, found that Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified information but that criminal charges weren’t warranted.

The report also said Biden had a “poor” memory, which prompted a fiery response from Biden during a Thursday night press conference. The president angrily questioned why the special counsel would write in his report that he couldn’t recall when his son Beau died.

“I don’t need anyone, anyone, to remind me when he passed away,” Biden said of the special counsel. “How the hell dare he raise that.”

Begala criticized the president’s response, arguing that an offensive strategy would have been more effective than going on the defense.

“What you do is attack. Change the subject. You can’t unring the bell,” Begala said. “I think Biden made it worse, no question about it.”

Ahead of the November election, Begala said, the president needs to switch gears.

“I want to see more Joe Biden, and the gaffes are built in. But instead of simply saying, ‘I’m OK’, he just simply, he needs to be on the attack 24/7 for the next 269 days,” Begala said.

The Democratic National Committee is going after the push to get Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name on the ballot in more than a dozen states by alleging his allies’ latest efforts violate federal election law — a sign that Democrats are worried about the presence of the independent candidate in the 2024 race.

The DNC officially filed a complaint against Kennedy with the Federal Election Commission on Friday claiming that American Values 2024 — the PAC supporting Kennedy — is illegally coordinating with his campaign to get him on additional state ballots. They say the $15 million the PAC is putting into a signature-gathering effort amounts to an in-kind contribution.

“Rather than doing that hard work itself, using money raised in compliance with the candidate contribution limits,” Robert Lenhard, DNC legal counsel, said. “The campaign is taking a shortcut outsourcing what is otherwise a core campaign function to a super PAC.”

The complaint is unlikely to go anywhere — the commission is evenly divided among the two major parties and frequently deadlocks on enforcement questions — but it signals that national Democrats are dialing up their efforts to target Kennedy, the current leading non-major party presidential candidate, over fears that he may siphon votes away from President Joe Biden in this year’s election.

A senior adviser for the DNC dismissed the idea that the complaint represents any concerns about polling showing Biden losing to former President Donald Trump or renewed fears about the president’s age.

“I think we’re concerned that Donald Trump is disrespecting the democratic process,” Ramsey Reid, a senior adviser at the DNC said. “It’s pretty clear that Trump and his megadonors are propping up RFK Jr. as a stalking horse.”

The American Values PAC called the DNC’s complaint a “desperate” attempt to keep Kennedy out of the race and “drain his campaign funds.” The Kennedy campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“The Biden administration and the DNC clearly find democracy inconvenient, want to stifle any dissenting opinions and don’t believe that their candidate can win a free, open and fair election,” Tony Lyons, co-chairman of American Values 2024, said.

The DNC highlighted Kennedy’s previous claim that it would cost $15 million to get him on the ballot nationwide. The super PAC’s effort to relieve Kennedy’s campaign of an expense they would otherwise need to incur would violate federal law, Lenhard said.

The FEC website offers guidance on in-kind contributions, but does not specifically mention signature gathering or ballot access as an example.

The DNC complaint mentions as precedent that the FEC blocked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ super PAC from providing his campaign with a list of signatories’ contact information in 2022 as evidence that Kennedy’s efforts are illegal.

American Values 2024 planned to narrow its ballot access campaign to seven states, including swing states like Georgia, Arizona and Michigan. The plan aimed to create a scenario where no candidate reaches the 270 electoral votes to clinch the presidency, allowing Kennedy a chance to win a contingent election in which congressional delegations from each state elect the next president.

Brittany Gibson contributed to this report.

Comedian Colin Jost will be tasked with entertaining journalists and Washington’s political elite at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this year, the association announced Friday.

Jost, who co-anchors Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” segment, will be the featured entertainer at the annual dinner on April 27, the White House Correspondents’ Association announced.

“Colin Jost knows how to make Saturday nights funny, and I am thrilled Colin will be live from the nation’s capital as the headline entertainer for this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner,” Kelly O’Donnell, WHCA president and NBC News senior White House correspondent, said in a statement.

Jost began writing for SNL in 2005 and has hosted “Weekend Update” since 2014, alongside comedian Michael Che.

Every week, “Weekend Update” touches on top news in the United States and around the world from a comedic angle, with Jost and Che often poking fun at U.S. officials, lawmakers and the media.

“His sharp insights perfectly meet this remarkable time of divided politics, and a presidential campaign careening toward a rematch,” O’Donnell added. “His smart brand of comedy and keen observation will turn up the heat on the national news media and across the political spectrum.”

Jost’s appearance follows comedian Roy Wood Jr.’s performance at the dinner last year, during which he poked fun at President Joe Biden, Republicans, Democrats and members of the media.

President Joe Biden on Thursday described Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza as “over the top” in a news conference at the White House.

In response to reporters’ shouted questions, the president expounded on his push for aid in Gaza and said the ongoing violence “has to stop.”

“There are a lot of innocent people who are starving. A lot of innocent people in trouble and dying. And it has to stop,” Biden said.

Biden has taken flak from the Democratic Party’s left flank over his support for Israel’s recent actions in the Gaza strip. His Thursday remarks were some of his sharpest criticism yet of the U.S.’s Middle Eastern ally.

The president further said that Egypt’s president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi “initially … did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in. I talked to him. I convinced him to open the gate.”

Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a critic of Israel’s conduct as it retaliates against Hamas, said of Biden’s comment, “A just war still needs to be weighed justly.”

The president’s main focus in the news conference was addressing the special counsel report released Thursday supporting the Justice Department’s decision not to charge Biden for mishandling classified documents.

A fiery President Joe Biden on Thursday night defended his mental capacity for the job and angrily questioned why the special counsel would write in his report that he couldn’t recall when his son Beau died.

“I don’t need anyone, anyone, to remind me when he passed away,” Biden said of the special counsel. “How the hell dare he raise that.”

“Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself, was it any of their damn business?” the president said in quickly organized remarks Thursday night to reporters from the Diplomatic Reception Room at the White House.

“The simple truth is that I sat for five hours, two days, over events going back 40 years. At the same time I was managing a national crisis,” he said of his sit down with Special Counsel Robert Hur, the author of the damning report.

Biden insisted his memory is “fine” and stressed he did not break the law in his handling of classified information from his time as vice president.

“I’ve seen headlines since the report was released about my willful retention of documents. This assertion is not only misleading, it’s just plain wrong,” Biden said.

His comments came hours after the release of a special counsel report on his handling of classified documents. That report concluded that no criminal charges were warranted but did so, in large part, by saying a jury would be sympathetic to Biden for having a poor memory. Biden traveled to a retreat of House Democrats on Thursday afternoon and claimed exoneration. But a person familiar with his remarks but not authorized to publicly discuss private conversations, said that he was privately livid over the Hur report.

White House officials were angered by the special counsel report, believing that Hur far exceeded his purview with comments about Biden’s memory. Two senior officials, not authorized to speak publicly about internal deliberations, believed Hur should have stuck to the task of determining wrongdoing or not, drawing references to how former FBI director James Comey cleared Hillary Clinton of wrongdoing during the 2016 campaign but still delivered a scathing assessment of her behavior in a public press conference.

At his press conference, Biden showed some of that anger he’d exhibited privately earlier. He went after the press for, in his estimation, pushing the idea that he was mentally not up to the task. He declined to entertain the idea that he should step aside as the prohibitive Democratic favorite to take on Donald Trump, saying he had the best qualifications for the post of president.