The special counsel investigating President Biden said in a report released on Thursday that Mr. Biden had “willfully” retained and disclosed classified material after leaving the vice presidency in 2017 but concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted.”
Robert K. Hur, the special counsel, said in an unflattering 300-plus-page report that Mr. Biden had left the White House after his vice presidency with classified documents about Afghanistan and notebooks with handwritten entries “implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods” taken from White House briefings.
Mr. Hur criticized Mr. Biden for sharing the content of the notebooks with a ghostwriter who helped him on his 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad,” even though he knew some of it was classified.
But the evidence “does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Mr. Hur, a former Trump Justice Department official appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in January 2023 to lead the inquiry after classified files were found in the garage and living areas of Mr. Biden’s home in Delaware and his former office in Washington.
While Mr. Hur decided not to prosecute Mr. Biden, 81, some of the reasoning he cited for his decision immediately created a new political crisis for the White House. In recounting his interviews with the president, Mr. Hur portrayed him as unable to remember key dates of his time in the Obama White House — or even precisely when his son Beau had died.
“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Mr. Hur wrote.
He cited Mr. Biden’s age by the time he would leave office — either in 2025 or 2029 — as an additional factor. It would be difficult to convince a jury that “a former president well into his 80s” was guilty of a felony that “requires a mental state of willfulness,” Mr. Hur added.
In a statement after the report was made public, Mr. Biden said he took national security seriously, “cooperated completely, threw up no roadblocks and sought no delays” in responding to Mr. Hur’s requests for information.
In fiery remarks later from the White House, Mr. Biden assailed the report, saying his memory was fine and that he had not willfully retained classified material. He also expressed outrage that Mr. Hur had suggested he could not remember when his son had died.
“How in the hell dare he raise that?” Mr. Biden said.
Earlier, the White House counsel and Mr. Biden’s private lawyers slammed Mr. Hur for suggesting the president had flouted the law even as he concluded that prosecutors did not have the evidence to prove that in court. And they assailed Mr. Hur’s characterization of Mr. Biden as suffering from memory problems, saying it was hardly unusual to have trouble recalling dates and details of long-ago occurrences.
Bob Bauer, Mr. Biden’s personal attorney, accused Mr. Hur of disregarding Justice Department “regulations and norms” and compared the special counsel’s conduct to that of James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director who during the 2016 presidential campaign criticized Hillary Clinton’s handling of sensitive information even though he declined to recommend criminal charges.
In a letter included in the appendix of the report, Mr. Biden’s lawyers called the inclusion of discussion of Mr. Biden’s memory “pejorative” and noted that the five-hour interview with the president had taken place shortly after the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks on Israel, after Mr. Biden had spent hours on the phone with foreign leaders.
“The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events,” they wrote, adding: “This language is not supported by the facts, nor is it appropriately used by a federal prosecutor in this context.”
Still, Mr. Hur’s assessment is sure to provide…
This article was originally published by a www.nytimes.com . Read the Original article here. .