CV NEWS FEED // President Joe Biden “willfully retained classified” documents at his private residence, Special Counsel Robert Hur concluded, but the counsel stated he will not charge the president with a crime due in part to the commander-in-chief’s “significantly limited” memory.
The prosecutor reported that during his official interviews of the president, Biden failed to remember the dates he served as vice president and also could not recall “even within several years” when his son Beau passed away.
“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 in a several-hundred-page report he sent to Attorney General Merrick Garland this week.
Biden deliberately kept “marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan,” Hur reported, as well as “notebooks containing … entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods.”
“FBI agents recovered these materials from the garage, offices, and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home,” wrote Hur.
Despite these findings, the special counsel stated that “no criminal charges are warranted” against the president, and that “the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Later in the report, Hur indicated that Biden’s “practices of retaining classified material in unsecured locations and reading classified material to [his] ghostwriter present serious risks to national security, given the vulnerability of extraordinarily sensitive information to loss or compromise to America’s adversaries.”
“But addressing those risks through criminal charges … is not the proper remedy here,” Hur wrote.
Hur indicated that his office has “considered” that at a hypothetical trial, “Biden would likely present himself to a jury … as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
“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,” Hur wrote.
The report gave several examples of what Hur called Biden’s “significantly limited” memory.
“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse,” the prosecutor wrote more than halfway into the report:
[Biden] did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”).
“He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died,” Hur noted.
Biden served as vice president from January 20, 2009 to January 20, 2017. Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015 at the age of 46.
“And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him,” Hur went on:
Among other things, [Biden] mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.
In a case where the government must prove that Mr. Biden knew he had possession of the classified Afghanistan documents after the vice presidency and chose to keep those documents, knowing he was violating the law, we expect that at trial, his attorneys would emphasize these limitations in his recall.
After the release of the special counsel report Thursday, pollster Frank Luntz wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “It will be hard for Democrats to make a case for this man to continue being President of the United States.”
“Biden’s lawyers dispute the characterization of his memory and cognitive performance in the Special Counsel Report,” Luntz stated in a subsequent post. “However, the only effective refutation will have to come straight from Biden’s mouth – not in a written statement prepared by his staff.”
The Heritage Foundation’s Mike Howell hinted that Congress should look into removing Biden under Section 4 of the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution after Hur’s report indicated the president was mentally compromised.
“Congress has a role in the 25th Amendment and therefore has a legislative purpose for oversight and investigations into, the now federally declared, ‘diminished faculties’ of President Biden,” wrote Howell, the director of Heritage’s Oversight Project. “Time for action.”
Howell clarified on X that Congress now has a “constitutionally permissible angle for … investigations” of Biden. “An executive branch finding of diminished faculties makes that clear.”
“What a stunning indictment of a sitting President,” Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wrote on X after news of the special counsel report broke.
Garland – Biden’s own attorney general – appointed Hur to serve as special counsel in the probe into Biden’s handling of the documents in January of last year.
Hur is a registered Republican and has served in the Department of Justice (DOJ) under both the Biden and Trump administrations.
EDITOR’S NOTE: This headline and story have been updated to better reflect the full content of the Special Counsel’s report.
