Biden Skipped 2024 Super Bowl Interview Over Hur Report Concerns, Aide Confirms
A trusted adviser to President Biden has confirmed that the decision to skip last year’s Super Bowl interview was influenced by concerns over the fallout from Special Counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified material.
Anita Dunn, 67, a longtime Biden confidant and former senior communications adviser, testified before the House Oversight Committee that the president’s inner circle anticipated tough questioning tied to the then-unreleased Hur report. According to sources familiar with her remarks, Biden’s team believed media attention would center on the classified records controversy rather than his policy agenda.
“They thought the main coverage would be about what he did with classified records and not about the President’s policy decisions,” one source recounted from Dunn’s testimony, adding that the decision was made even before the report’s official release.
Released on February 5, 2024, Hur’s report concluded that Biden would likely appear to a jury as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” — language that ignited a heated national debate about his age and mental fitness. Biden’s legal team had reviewed the report on February 3 and 4, just days before the February 11 Super Bowl LVIII broadcast. News of his decision to decline the interview surfaced on February 3, marking the second consecutive year he had opted out.
The missed opportunity was notable — the annual Super Bowl interview offers presidents a rare, high-visibility platform to reach tens of millions of Americans, especially during an election year.
Dunn’s testimony also revealed that Biden’s top advisers discussed the possibility of a cognitive test but reached a consensus that it would yield “no political benefit.” While emphasizing that Biden was always the final decision-maker, she underscored that the choice not to pursue such testing was strategic rather than medically driven.
Despite these behind-the-scenes decisions, Dunn defended Biden’s engagement with the media. Citing research from Towson University’s Martha Joynt Kumar, she noted that over his presidency, Biden held 37 formal press conferences, participated in 151 interviews, and engaged in 679 informal gaggles with reporters — surpassing many of his predecessors since Ronald Reagan.
“I did not observe White House staff making key decisions or exercising the powers of the presidency without President Biden’s knowledge or consent,” Dunn testified.
Biden’s aides maintain that his avoidance of the Super Bowl interview was a calculated choice to prevent a political spectacle at a moment when the Hur report’s conclusions threatened to overshadow his policy messaging.
