Special counsel report concludes Biden willfully retained classified information but will not face charges
Originally Published: 08 FEB 24 11:57 ET
Updated: 08 FEB 24 15:06 ET
By Evan Perez, Holmes Lybrand, Hannah Rabinowitz, Devan Cole, Jeremy Herb and Zachary Cohen, CNN
Washington (CNN) — Special counsel Robert Hur released a searing report Thursday that concluded President Joe Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified military and national security information but will not face charges after a year long investigation into his handling of classified documents.
“We concluded that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” Hur concluded. “We would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president.”
Hur wrote that Biden believed he was allowed to keep the classified information that was contained in his personal notebooks, concluding that prosecutors wouldn’t be able to prove Biden intended to break the law at trial.
One of the reasons Hur chose not to bring charges, according to the report, was that it would be difficult to prosecute Biden, who could appear to a jury as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Biden also cooperated with the investigation and returned the classified documents once they were discovered, Hur wrote — noting the significant differences between this case and the charges against former President Donald Trump.
The special counsel investigation found that Biden knew about the classified documents in his home as far back as 2017, when he was no longer vice president, and that he shared some of the information with the ghostwriter for his memoir published that year.
The public release of the 345-page report marks the conclusion of Hur’s investigation.
The report’s findings are likely to draw harsh criticism from Trump and his allies in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election. Republicans have long drawn parallels between Hur’s investigation and that of special counsel Jack Smith, who last year brought charges against the former president related to his handling of classified documents after he left the White House, despite critical differences in the two cases.
According to the report, “FBI agents recovered these materials from the garage, offices, and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home.”
The materials included “marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan and notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence source and methods.”
According to the report, investigators found Biden’s “memory was significantly limited” in interviews they conducted with the then-president in 2023 as well as interviews with his ghostwriter.
Because of that, Hur wrote in the report, investigators concluded that 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.”
“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,” they wrote, adding that Biden “is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt.”
A White House official noted that Biden was interviewed just days after Israel was raided in October which was occupying his time.
Hur also wrote that the government did not believe it could prove that Biden “intended to do something the law forbids.”
Biden was “emphatic,” according to the report, that his handwritten notebooks containing classified information were his property, saying in his interview with the special counsel’s office that “every president before me has done the exact same thing.”
Differences between Trump and Biden classified documents investigations
Hur noted in his report there were distinctions between the Trump and Biden cases.
Among them is the fact that the National Archives repeatedly tried and failed to get back documents in Trump’s possession. At one point, the FBI secured a search warrant to search his Florida estate.
Biden’s attorneys, on the other hand, notified the National Archives of the materials found in his possession. Those documents were discovered on November 2, just six days before the midterm elections, but the president’s attorneys only publicly acknowledged the discovery of the documents on November 7 — when news reports about the discovery broke.
“Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite.” Hur wrote. “According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it.
“In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview, and in other ways cooperated with the investigation,” Hur noted.
Congress receives the report
Even before the report’s release, Republican lawmakers vowed to continue their own congressional investigation into the matter. Congressional lawmakers received a hard copy of the report on Thursday afternoon, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Hur, a former Trump-appointed US attorney, to lead the criminal probe after Biden’s aides found classified files at his home in Delaware and a private office in Washington, DC.
Though Biden frequently avoids commenting on the case, he said in January 2023 he was surprised to learn that classified documents were found in his former office and that he did not know what was in them. The White House Counsel’s Office has already reviewed the report, according to a spokesperson, and declined to exert any executive privilege on its content.
CNN previously reported that US intelligence memos and briefing materials covering a range of topics, including Ukraine, Iran and the United Kingdom, were among the documents found at the locations connected to Biden, according to a source familiar with the matter.
After documents were found at Biden’s home later in January, he said he was cooperating fully with the Justice Department. Biden added that the documents were in a “locked garage.”
The federal probe included interviews with a broad spectrum of witnesses, including Biden himself, who sat for an interview with investigators in October. Investigators also interviewed longtime Biden adviser and current counselor Steve Ricchetti; former White House legal and communications aides; and Kathy Chung, an ex-executive assistant to Biden.
This story is breaking and will be updated.
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