by The special counsel investigating President Biden said in a report released Thursday that Biden had “intentionally” withheld and disclosed classified material after leaving the vice presidency in 2017, but concluded that “criminal charges are not warranted.”
Robert K. Hur, the special prosecutor, said in an unflattering report of more than 300 pages that Biden had left the White House after his vice presidency with classified documents on Afghanistan and notebooks with handwritten notes “implying sensitive intelligence sources and methods” taken from White House briefings.
Hur criticized Biden for sharing the contents of the notebooks with a ghostwriter who helped him on his 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad,” although I knew some of it was classified.
But the evidence “does not establish Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Hur, a former Trump Justice Department official appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in January 2023 to lead the investigation after it was They will find classified files in the garage and living areas of Biden’s home in Delaware and his former office in Washington.
While Hur decided not to prosecute Biden, 81, some of the reasoning he cited for his decision immediately created a new political crisis for the White House. Recounting his interviews with the president, Hur described him as unable to remember key dates from his time in the Obama White House, or even precisely when his son Beau had died.
“Mr. Biden would probably present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-intentioned old man with a bad memory,” Hur wrote.
He cited Biden’s age at the time he would leave office, either in 2025 or 2029, as an additional factor. It would be difficult to convince a jury that “a former president over 80 years old” was guilty of a serious crime that “requires a stubborn state of mind,” Hur added.
In a statement after the report’s release, Biden said he took national security seriously, “cooperated fully, created no obstacles, and sought no delays” in responding to Hur’s requests for information.
In fiery comments later from the White House, Biden attacked the report, saying his memory was fine and that he had not intentionally withheld classified material. He also expressed her outrage that Hur had suggested that she did not remember when her son had died.
“How the hell dare you bring that up?” Mr. Biden said.
Previously, White House counsel and Biden’s private attorneys criticized Hur for suggesting the president had broken the law even as he concluded prosecutors had no evidence to prove it in court. And they attacked Hur’s characterization of Biden as if he suffered from memory problems, saying it was not unusual to have trouble remembering dates and details of events that occurred long ago.
Bob Bauer, Biden’s personal lawyer, accused Hur of ignoring the Justice Department’s “regulations and standards” and compared the special counsel’s conduct to that of James B. Comey, the FBI director who during the 2016 presidential campaign criticized Hillary Clinton’s handling of classified information even though she declined to recommend criminal charges.
In a letter included in the report’s appendix, Biden’s lawyers called the inclusion of a discussion of Biden’s memory “pejorative” and noted that the five-hour interview with the president had taken place shortly after the terrorist attacks on October 7. on Israel, after Biden had spent hours on the phone with foreign leaders.
“The report uses very damaging language to describe a common occurrence among witnesses: a lack of memory for events that occurred years ago,” they wrote, adding: “This language is not supported by the facts, nor is it used appropriately by a prosecutor federal”. in this context.”
Still, Hur’s assessment is sure to provide powerful new lines of attack for former President Donald J. Trump. Trump has long sought to sow doubt about Biden’s suitability for office, and has been trying to discredit the Justice Department for its much more serious investigation into Trump’s withholding of classified materials after leaving office and their alleged obstruction of the government’s efforts to recover them.
Hur’s report includes a photo of the open box where the FBI found classified documents from Afghanistan in Biden’s cluttered garage, next to a ladder and old exercise equipment, and another image of sensitive materials stored in a cardboard bank box. .
Similar images taken during the 2022 search of Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, showed that he had stored boxes in a bathroom that could be accessed by visitors. After Hur’s report became public, Trump sent the image of Biden’s garage through his campaign email account, along with the claim, unsupported by any evidence, that he had been “much more cooperative.” than Biden.
In fact, Hur noted that Biden had cooperated fully with the investigation, allowing investigators unhindered access to his properties. Trump has been accused of misleading the government for months about the hundreds of highly classified documents he had in his possession and having his staff move boxes while officials sought their return.
In the report’s introduction, Hur suggested that Biden’s cooperation with investigators was a factor in his decision not to press charges.
Unlike Biden, Trump refused to return the materials he withheld “after being given multiple opportunities to return the documents and avoid prosecution,” he wrote.
Hur was subject to a Justice Department legal policy that makes sitting presidents immune from being charged with crimes while in office. But he said his decision not to pursue criminal charges would have been the same even if regulations had allowed him to charge Biden.
The special counsel conducted 173 interviews, including those of Biden and his top advisers, and examined hundreds of thousands of documents. Some of the material was collected before Hur took over the investigation, when Garland assigned John R. Lausch Jr., then a Trump-appointed federal prosecutor in Chicago, to conduct preliminary investigations.
It was Lausch who recommended appointing a special prosecutor, department officials said.
Some of the classified material related to Biden’s 2009 opposition to the temporary troop surge in Afghanistan supported by President Barack Obama’s team, which he viewed as “a Vietnam-like mistake,” Hur wrote.
Other documents referred more broadly to Biden’s attempt to “document his legacy and cite evidence that he was a presidential wooden man,” the report notes.
In a recorded conversation at a rental property in Virginia in February 2017, a month after leaving office, Biden told his ghostwriter that he “just found all the stuff classified downstairs.”
Hur said the exchange was the strongest basis for a prosecution he had found. But he concluded that a jury was unlikely to convict Biden, given that he had become accustomed to legally retaining documents as vice president, may not have fully adapted to the new restrictions, and believed he had a right to retain his personal notes. – based on President Ronald Reagan’s withholding of similar materials for decades.
In his interview with investigators, Biden declared that his notebooks were “my property” and said that “every president before me has done the same thing,” singling out Reagan.
The special counsel said Biden was wrong about the law, but admitted that his opinion “finds some support in historical practice.”
Hur said the decision not to charge Biden with possessing the other classified materials was simpler: Prosecutors could not establish whether the classified documents discovered in Biden’s home had been intentionally withheld or obtained during his vice presidency. Presidency and poorly stored.
Classified documents discovered in Biden’s Delaware garage in a “badly damaged box surrounded by household debris” indicated that he may have simply forgotten he had them over the years, rather than intentionally breaking the law, Hur concluded.
charlie wild contributed with reports.
