The special counsel investigating President Biden said in a report released Thursday that he had decided not to prosecute Mr. Biden over his handling of classified material after he left the vice presidency in early 2017, but had found evidence that Mr. .Biden deliberately withheld and disclosed some sensitive material.
The report said Mr Biden had left the White House after his vice presidency with classified documents on Afghanistan and notebooks with handwritten entries “involving sensitive sources and methods of intelligence” from internal White House briefings.
Robert K. Hur, the special counsel, said in his report that Mr. Biden had shared the notebooks with a ghostwriter who helped him with his 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.”
Mr. Hurr, a former Trump Justice Department official who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in January 2023 to lead the investigation after classified records were found in the garage and living quarters of Mr. Biden’s home in Delaware and of his former office in Washington. said his decision not to press charges would have been the same even if Justice Department policy had not precluded indictment of the sitting president.
“We conclude that the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” Mr. Hur wrote.
Mr. Hurr cited Mr. Biden’s cooperation with investigators, in stark contrast to the behavior of former President Donald J. Trump when documents were discovered at his Florida resort as one of the factors in his decision not to press charges.
While Mr. Hurr decided not to prosecute Mr. Biden, his reasons for doing so are likely to raise new questions about the president’s behavior and state of mind.
It would also provide powerful new political arguments for Mr. Trump in his battle to discredit the department over its much more serious investigation into its retention of classified material, which led to criminal charges last summer.
In a conversation recorded at a rented property in Virginia in February 2017 – a month after he left office – Mr Biden told his ghostwriter that he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs”.
Mr. Hurr said the exchange was the strongest basis for a prosecution he had found, but that jurors were unlikely to convict Mr. Biden, given the fact that he was used to keeping legal documents as vice president, he might not have adjusted fully to the new restrictions and believed he had the right to retain them — based on President Reagan’s retention of similar materials.
The fact that the document was discovered in his Delaware garage in a “heavily damaged box surrounded by household debris” showed he may simply have forgotten he had it all these years, rather than deliberately breaking the law, Mr Hurr concluded. .
Another reason he chose not to impeach Mr. Biden was even less flattering. Mr. Hurr cited Mr. Biden’s poor recollection of events during a two-day interview with prosecutors last fall.
“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a likable, well-meaning old man with a bad memory,” Mr. Hur wrote.
It would be difficult to convince a jury after Mr. Biden left that “a former president in his eighties” was guilty of a felony that “requires a willful state of mind.”
