The special counsel investigating President Joe Biden over his handling of classified documents released his final report on Thursday, revealing photos of sensitive records located in a “mangled” box in the garage of his Delaware home.
The FBI located the classified material in the garage of Biden’s Wilmington estate, as well as in a basement den. While special counsel Robert Hur’s report ultimately did not recommend criminal charges for the president, the descriptions of the way Biden responded to questions about such documents called into question Biden’s core faculties, including his memory and awareness.
“Among the places Mr. Biden’s lawyers found classified documents in the garage was a damaged, opened box containing numerous hanging folders, file folders, and binders. The box … was in a mangled state,” according to Hur’s nearly 400-page report.
Hur wrote that Biden had portrayed himself as “an elderly man with a poor memory” who a jury would find sympathetic but noted jurors would likely be “struck” by the locations where Afghanistan documents were found inside the Wilmington home.
The Afghanistan documents were located in a “badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood,” Hur added.
Hur wrote that a juror “could conclude” that this is not where a person should intentionally store what one “supposedly considers to be important classified documents, critical to his legacy.”
“Rather, it looks more like a place a person stores classified documents he has forgotten about or is unaware of. We have considered — and investigated — the possibility that the box was intentionally placed in the garage to make it appear to be there by mistake, but the evidence does not support that conclusion,” Hur said.
Biden will likely face a rematch in the 2024 election against former President Donald Trump, who is facing criminal charges over classified documents he took with him when he left the White House in 2021. When the archivists found out the records were missing and asked Trump to return them, prosecutors say he did not comply immediately with their effort.
In June, Trump was charged with 37 felonies, including willful retention of national defense information, a violation of the Espionage Act.
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The former president also had hundreds more classified documents in his possession than did Biden. More than 300 in total were recovered from Trump, in addition to 102 that were taken during an FBI raid of Trump’s Palm Beach resort home in August 2022.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to the charges and is facing three other indictments amid his pursuit to win back the Oval Office.
