President Joe Biden furiously challenged the impression outlined in a special counsel report that his “poor memory” and mental limitations may have factored into his mishandling of classified materials.
The report spells out why Biden won’t face charges following an investigation into the classified documents and materials that were found at his private Delaware home and the Penn Biden Center in 2022 and 2023.
Investigators determined that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” after his time as vice president while he was a private citizen. Those materials were marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan and notebooks containing Biden’s handwritten entries about matters of national security and foreign policy that were collected from sensitive intelligence sources.
Despite the fact that Biden deliberately kept these documents, Special Counsel Robert Hur noted that if the case was taken to trial, the president’s attorneys could present a few arguments that would make it difficult for a jury to determine he acted with criminal intent, including calling his mental agility into question.
“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,” the report states. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him – by then a former president well into his eighties – of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Biden condemned the impression that his age or mental faculties impact his work or his knowledge of White House procedures.
“I am well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing,” Biden told reporters on…
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