US President Joe Biden answers questions from the press following his remarks regarding lowering cost for American families in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Thursday January 12, 2023.
Demetrius Freeman | The Washington Post | Getty Images
President Joe Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency,” according to a final report released Thursday by a Department of Justice special counsel.
But special counsel Robert Hur said he was declining to prosecute Biden over his handling of classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and notebooks containing Biden’s entries about national security.
The FBI found that material in the garage, offices and basement den in Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home.
“Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” Hur wrote.
But that evidence “does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” the special counsel wrote.
Hur in his nearly 400-page report wrote, “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
“We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” the report said. “We reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president.”
The special counsel said that Biden had shared some classified information with his ghostwriter for his second memoir, “Promise Me, Dad,” published in 2017, which Hur said did not appear to contain any classified information.
The report comes nearly 13 months after Attorney General Merrick Garland named Hur the special counsel to lead the probe into classified records that were found at the president’s office and residence in late…
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