The Department of Justice announced Thursday that it found President Joe Biden mishandled classified documents, including some related to Afghanistan, in the time since he was vice president and senator but that his actions did not amount to criminal conduct.
Special counsel Robert Hur detailed the findings in a lengthy 345-page report, the culmination of a yearlong investigation into how documents with classified markings ended up at Biden’s office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., and at his home in Wilmington, Delaware.
“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.
The DOJ made the report public Thursday afternoon, after White House attorneys had completed their review of it and requested no redactions, and after the DOJ had provided a hard copy of it to Congress.
The report provided a jarring glimpse into the mental state of Biden, who is 81 years old and running for reelection.
Hur said that he did not recommend charges against Biden in part because the president’s memory was “significantly limited.” The special counsel said that the president was also cooperative, and that, when coupled with his “limited precision and recall,” a jury might conclude that Biden had merely made an innocent mistake.
Hur found Biden was renting a home in Virginia in February 2017, shortly after he left the vice presidency, when he told the ghostwriter of his memoir in a recorded conversation that he had “just found all that classified stuff downstairs.”
“Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023,” Hur wrote, noting Biden would likely come off to a jury “as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Hur said evidence supported that the documents Biden was referencing in Virginia were the same documents, which contained classified information about Afghanistan, that were eventually found in his Wilmington home garage “in a badly damaged box surrounded by household detritus.”
Hur also found that Biden disclosed classified information to his ghostwriter while reading from notebooks in which he kept notes from intelligence meetings during the Obama administration. The FBI found the notebooks in unlocked drawers in the basement and office of Biden’s Wilmington home, Hur said.
Hur said Biden’s actions “risked serious damage to America’s national security.”
In addition to his home in Wilmington, FBI agents found that Biden stored classified material at the Penn Biden Center and the University of Delaware. The special counsel determined that Biden’s retention of classified documents at the latter two locations was not willful.
Biden’s retention of the documents came to light through a media report on Jan. 9, 2023, and Biden responded at the time through his counsel that his team had discovered a handful of documents at his Washington, D.C., in early November 2022, days before the midterm elections.
The revelation that Biden kept the findings from the public for more than two months prompted concerns about the president’s lack of transparency. Republicans, in particular, raised questions about whether the DOJ would investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents as intensely as it did former President Donald Trump‘s.
Knowingly removing classified material from a secure location or willfully holding on to classified material is a federal crime. Hur was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland a few days after the public learned of the documents to investigate whether Biden or his aides had committed such crimes.
Biden publicly maintained that he was “surprised” to learn of the documents and that he did not know what was in them.
Before Hur took over the investigation, much of the investigative activity surrounding Biden’s documents occurred under the public’s radar, even as Trump was being scrutinized publicly over a similar topic. The former president was indicted last June in a separate special counsel inquiry over alleged mishandling of classified material.
And while Biden White House counsel Richard Sauber initially responded on Jan. 9, 2023, that the president’s personal attorneys discovered a “small number” of documents at the Penn Biden Center, that story quickly evolved, and lawyers and FBI agents subsequently discovered more documents in additional locations.
Media reports several weeks later revealed that the FBI, in coordination with the president, had conducted a search of the Penn Biden Center in mid-November 2022, unbeknownst to the public.
When Garland announced Hur’s appointment, he also revealed that Biden’s personal attorneys notified the DOJ that they had discovered another batch of documents with classified markings at Biden’s Wilmington residence on Dec. 20, 2022, prompting the FBI to go retrieve them.
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Trump is facing felony charges in Florida for alleged willful retention of national defense information and obstruction of justice, and his trial is expected to begin while he is in the thick of his campaign later this year.
