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 special counsel’s final report released Thursday.
But the 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.
Hur in his nearly 400-page report wrote that Biden had portrayed himself as “an elderly man with a poor memory” who a criminal jury would find sympathetic.
“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.
“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 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 2022.
Hur’s report lands in the middle of a 2024 presidential race that is already spiked with legal intrigue and outrage.
Biden faces a likely rematch against former President Donald Trump, who is facing criminal charges over classified documents he took with him when he left the White House in 2021. When archivists noticed they were…
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