Special counsel Robert Hur‘s report on his 15-month investigation into President Joe Biden‘s mishandling of classified documents includes damning assessments of the president’s mental acuity amid concerns about his age before November’s election.
In his nearly 400-page report, Hur provides details regarding his decision not to prosecute Biden criminally, unlike former President Donald Trump, such as the likelihood that a jury would sympathize with him and that he could not remember, “even within several years,” when his son Beau Biden died, among other important dates.
“Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interview with the ghostwriter in 2017 and in his interview with our officer in 2023,” Hur wrote.
“We have also considered that, at trial, 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,” he said. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. 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.”
Biden, the White House, and Biden’s personal attorneys have defended the president from Hur’s report, all three underscoring the lack of criminal charges.
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“The special counsel released today its findings about its look into my handling of classified documents,” Biden wrote. “I was pleased to see they reached the conclusion I believed all along they would reach — that there would be no charges brought in this case and the matter is now closed.”
“This was an exhaustive investigation going back more than 40 years, even into the 1970s when I was a young senator,” he said. “I cooperated completely, threw up no roadblocks, and sought no delays. In fact, I was so determined to give the special counsel what they needed that I went forward with five hours of in-person interviews over two days on October 8th and 9th of last year, even though Israel had just been attacked on October 7th and I was in the middle of handling an international crisis. I just believed that’s what I owed the American people so they could know no charges would be brought and the matter closed.”
