The White House defended President Joe Biden after special counsel Robert Hur did not file criminal charges for mishandling classified documents but also pushed back on the report’s conclusions that the 81-year-old president’s memory was going.
“We do not believe that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate,” Bob Bauer, Biden’s personal counsel, and White House special counsel Robert Sauber wrote in a joint response included in the report.
The Department of Justice found 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.
Ultimately, Hur’s investigation determined that the classified documents largely concerned Biden’s attempts to persuade former President Barack Obama not to surge troops to Afghanistan shortly after the pair entered office.
Still, Hur opted not to bring charges for several reasons, including what the special counsel detailed as Biden’s faulty and failing memory.
“We have also considered that, at trial, 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,” the special counsel wrote. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify a 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 said Thursday that he was “pleased” by Hur’s decision not to bring charges against him and called the investigation into his mishandling of classified documents “closed.”
“The Special Counsel released today its findings about its look into my handling of classified documents. 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,” the president wrote of the “exhaustive investigation.”
“I cooperated completely, threw up no roadblocks, and sought no delays,” he continued, noting that he sat for interviews with the special counsel’s office in the days following Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks in Israel.
The report was published in full Thursday afternoon while Biden was traveling to Leesburg, Virginia, to address House Democratic lawmakers at their 2024 annual retreat.
Bauer and Sauber both also released statements claiming the Hur report exonerates Biden.
Sauber wrote that the White House disagreed “with a number of inaccurate and inappropriate comments in the Special Counsel’s report” but claimed that the ultimate decision not to charge Biden “is firmly based on the facts and evidence.”
“Not only was there no obstruction, the President’s cooperation throughout this 15-month investigation has been extraordinary,” he explained. “The simple truth is President Biden takes classified information seriously and strives to protect it. He has spent decades at the highest levels of government defending and advancing America’s national security and foreign policy interests and protecting her secrets.”
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“We welcome this conclusion to the inquiry. But to be clear, it was plain from the outset that criminal charges were not warranted,” Bauer added. “The president kept personal notes and diaries, as have many presidents throughout our nation’s history, going all the way back to the Founding Fathers. The Department of Justice has been aware of this note-taking practice for decades. Until now, the Department never chose to investigate the practice, much less the contents of a president’s personal notes and diaries, even when DOJ expressly acknowledged that they might contain classified material.”
