Special counsel Robert Hur’s report released Thursday did not charge President Joe Biden with a crime, but it painted a picture of a forgetful commander in chief who failed to properly protect highly sensitive classified information – a depiction that could hurt Biden politically.
The special counsel report found that Biden willfully retained classified information, including top secret documents, knew about it as far back as 2017, and shared some of that information with the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir.
Perhaps worse politically, Hur wrote that one reason Biden wasn’t going to be prosecuted was because he would present to a jury as an elderly man “with a poor memory.” Biden’s lawyers objected to the description – calling it “investigative excess” and accusing Hur of flouting Justice Department rules and norms.
The report is sure to become an issue in the 2024 campaign – where Biden’s likely opponent, Donald Trump, is facing criminal charges for his handling of classified material, even though Hur made clear how different the two cases were.
Here are the takeaways from Thursday’s report:
Hur laid out in detail how Biden mishandled classified materials, writing that FBI agents discovered materials from “the garage, offices, and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home.”
The materials included classified documents, including some marked at the highest top secret/sensitive compartmented information level, related to military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, as well as and notebooks “containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence source and methods.”
The special counsel raised Biden’s age and memory in explaining…
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