President Biden confused key dates during his October interview with special counsel Robert Hur, forgetting which year his son Beau died of brain cancer, as well as the year Donald Trump was elected president, a transcript of the sitdown shows.

During a discussion of why he kept sensitive papers after leaving the vice presidency in 2017, Biden launched into a rambling explanation in which he said Beau, who died in 2015, was “deployed or is dying” after he left office in 2017.

“I don’t know. This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?” Biden, who turned 81 in November, queried during the first of two days of questioning by Hur on Oct. 8 — when asked “where did you keep papers” after leaving office as vice president “when you were living at Chain Bridge Road” in northern Virginia.

“Remember, in this timeframe, my son is — either been deployed or is dying, and, and so it was — and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period, except the President,” Biden said, referring to President Barack Obama.

“I’m not — and not a mean thing to say. He just thought that she [Hillary Clinton] had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did.”

Biden proceeded to ask: “What month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30 —“

At that point, White House lawyer Rachel Cotton and an unidentified man reminded Biden that his son died in 2015.

“Was it 2015 he had died?” Biden responded, according to the transcript.

“It was May of 2015,” he was told.

“It was 2015,” Biden repeated. 

The sequence contradicted Biden’s angry claim that Hur had inappropriately raised his son’s death during the interview.

“There’s even some reference that I don’t remember when my son died,” the president said Feb. 8. “How the hell dare he raise that? Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself it wasn’t any of their damned business.”

In fact, the transcript shows Biden brought up Beau’s death unprompted by the special counsel.

Moments later, Biden referenced Trump’s election to the presidency and asked if he had been elected in “November of 2017” rather than the previous year.

The president also twice forgot over the course of one of the interview days what a fax machine is and had to be prompted by his staff.

Asked by Hur on the afternoon of Oct. 8, 2023, whether he ever brought classified material to his lake house in Wilmington, Del., Biden said, “Occasionally, because I did a lot of business from there.”

“I have a library, and the library has a — two filing cabinets, and it has built into the walls — when I built that home, built into the walls, a space for a copy machine, for — what do you call it, when they send these —,” the president said.

“Fax machine,” White House Counsel Ed Siskel cut in.

“Fax machine,” Biden echoed.

Minutes later, the president again forgot the name of “the machine” and had to be reminded by Siskel.

Biden also forgot the name of the agency that assumes possession of the classified documents from presidents and vice presidents after they leave office — and couldn’t recall which aide handed some of the files off.

“Was she the one that was getting material to the University of Delaware,” he wondered aloud. “[O]ne of them focused on taking the things that she thought that Delaware might want, or that would go to the — what’s it called? You know, the federal government.”

The [National] Archives,” said Bob Bauer, the president’s personal attorney.

Biden appeared in a redacted portion of the transcript to have divulged further classified information when answering a question about material on the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

“[D]id you consult these materials relating to the Iran nuclear deal at any point? Did you know that they were at the Penn Biden Center?” Hur asked.

“No. And I, I don’t recall consulting anything having to do with any material with regard to Iran,” Biden answered before going on to share information redacted from the transcript by the State Department, Pentagon and National Security Council.

“And, sir, just to clarify, that’s during your … your presidency, which they’re not interested in,” Siskel jumped in.

“No, I know, but I want to give you context in my, my — the depth of my engagement,” Biden said.

Key portions of Biden’s statements to Hur hinged on a recorded conversation that the now-president had with his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, on Feb. 16, 2017, during which Biden said, “I just found all the marked classified stuff downstairs.”

The president told Hur he did not recall finding the classified material before that meeting, but the special counsel’s report found evidence that it included “classified documents about Afghanistan that FBI agents found in 2022 in his Delaware garage.”

“I wanted to be clear to him that I didn’t want — what he just heard me say about the memo to Barack, even though it wasn’t a Top Secret thing,” Biden said in his Oct. 9 interview with Hur.

“I didn’t, I didn’t want any of that mentioned, it was confidential. I didn’t — not confidential in the classification sense, but don’t, don’t write about that. That’s off the record. That’s not something I want to be talking about in the book, about Beau.”

Another investigator on Hur’s team, deputy special counsel Marc Krickbaum, then asked Biden about the rest of that February day.

“And then you had lunch at the Four Seasons Hotel at Georgetown,” Krickbaum said, reading from a copy of his schedule.

“I ate there all the time,” Biden replied. “What’d I do there at the Four Seasons? Who’d I have lunch with?”

“Actually, I’m not sure,” Krickbaum said. “Still have to figure that out.”

“I don’t remember,” the president concluded.

Rob Walker, a former business associate of Hunter Biden, testified to Congress in January of this year that he, Hunter and Joe Biden had lunch with Ye Jianming, the chairman of a Chinese government-linked energy firm, and others at the DC Four Seasons in “early 2017.”

The firm, CEFC China Energy, later that year paid at least $5 million to accounts linked to first family members, beginning on March 1, 2017.

Biden at still another point veered into a lengthy recounting of his days in Wilmington, Del., as a young public defender and Democratic Party operative, explaining how he “amassed a lot of material” on party politics during that time in a similar manner to how he did during his vice presidency.

“I had been involved in the civil rights movement,” the president told Hur. “That got me deeply involved in trying to reform the Democratic Party, which was a southern Democratic Party.”

Biden has falsely claimed participation in the movement during his presidency — despite having admitted in 1987 during his first run for the White House that he “was not an activist.”

In his interview with Hur, he went on to say, “We were the only state in the nation occupied by the military for 10 months with drawn bayonets at every corner when Dr. King was assassinated, and that’s really what got me going.”

Wilmington was just one of several US cities that the National Guard occupied in the wake of the assasination, along with Detroit, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., among others.

Biden had also mentioned the anecdote during the May 2022 memorial service for former vice president Walter Mondale.

The period Biden discussed took place before his successful run as a Democrat for New Castle County Council in 1970, and he said his “generic point was there was a lot of material that I had amassed that I wanted to save.”

“I probably still have it somewhere. And so that stuff would travel wherever the hell I was,” he added.

The Post obtained a copy of the transcript shortly before Hur appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to discuss his probe of Biden’s retention of classified national security information after leaving office. The contents were first reported by the New York Times.

Hur triggered outrage in his report last month, when he said he would not recommend charges against Biden in part because the 81-year-old president would present himself to a jury as an “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

In his prepared remarks to the Judiciary panel, the special counsel said he had been prepared to defend the characterization in light of his decision not to bring charges.

“The need to show my work was especially strong here,” the remarks read. “The attorney general had appointed me to investigate the actions of the attorney general’s boss, the sitting president of the United States.

“I knew that for my decision to be credible, I could not simply announce that I recommended no criminal charges and leave it at that. I needed to explain why.”

Hur also said he would not deviate from the contents of the report itself and that “the evidence and the President himself put his memory squarely at issue.”

With Post wires