U.S. President Joe Biden answers questions from the press following his remarks on cutting costs for American families on Thursday, January 12, 2023, in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Demetrius Freeman | The Washington Post | Getty Images
President Joe Biden “intentionally withheld and disclosed classified material after his vice presidency,” the Justice Department’s special counsel said in a report released Thursday.
But special counsel Robert Hur also said he would not prosecute Biden over his handling of that material.
The FBI found classified documents in the garage, office and basement of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, which Hur’s report said should have been returned to the U.S. government when Biden ended his second term as vice president in January 2017, he said.
The documents included classified information about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan and notebooks containing Biden’s entries on national security.
“Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden intentionally withheld and disclosed classified material after his vice presidency, when he was a private citizen,” Hur wrote in his nearly 400-page report.
“He knew that he was keeping confidential information in notebooks kept in his home and he knew that he was not allowed to do so,” the special prosecutor said.
Biden even shared some classified information with his ghostwriter for his second memoir, “Promise Me, Dad,” published in 2017, which Hur said did not appear to contain any classified information.
But Hur added that the evidence “does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“We also considered that Mr. Biden would likely present himself at trial before a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a personable, well-meaning, older man with a poor memory,” the special counsel said.
“We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” the report said. “We reach the same conclusion even if Justice Department policy did not provide for criminal charges against a sitting president.”
Biden said in a statement about the report: “I was pleased to see that they have come to the conclusion I had believed all along – that no charges will be filed in this case and the matter is now closed.”
“I cooperated fully, created no obstacles and sought no delays,” the president said.
“Veiled” memory
Hurs detailed errors in Biden’s recollection when he was interviewed for the investigation.
“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse,” Hur wrote.
“He didn’t remember when he was vice president, forgot when his term ended on the first day of the interview (“If it was 2013 – when did I stop being vice president?”) and forgot it on the second day of the interview as his term began (“Am I still vice president in 2009?”),” the report says.
“He did not even remember when his son Beau died for several years,” the special prosecutor said. “And his memory seemed blurry when he described the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him.”
“Among other things, he falsely said that he had a “real disagreement” with Gen. Karl Eikenberry, when in fact Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.”
Hur said he expected Biden’s lawyers to use these memory lapses as a defense if he were prosecuted.
“In a case where the government must prove that Mr. Biden knew he was in possession of the secret Afghanistan documents after the vice presidency and chose to preserve those documents even though he knew he had broken the law , we assume his attorneys would emphasize this at trial.” “These limitations apply to his removal,” the special counsel wrote.
In a letter accompanying the report, Biden’s lawyers complained to Hur about his “prejudicial and inflammatory” description of the President’s “inability to recall dates or details of events that occurred years ago.” They said Biden’s failure to recall specific information was to be expected given the passage of time.
The attorneys wrote that Hur did not use “denigrating” language to describe other witnesses’ failure to recall years of events.
Biden versus Trump
The report comes nearly 13 months after Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Hur as special counsel to lead the investigation into classified documents found in the president’s former private office in Washington and at his residence in late 2022.
The report was released in the middle of a presidential campaign already fraught with legal intrigue and outrage.
Biden, a Democrat, likely faces a fall rematch against former President Donald Trump, a Republican he defeated in the 2020 election.
Trump is facing criminal charges for keeping secret documents at his Florida home after leaving the White House in January 2021. When officials noticed that some of those documents were missing from the National Archives and asked Trump to return them, he refused, prosecutors said.
Trump was indicted last June on 37 felony counts, including willfully withholding national defense information, a violation of the Espionage Act. He has pleaded not guilty in the case, which is being heard in federal court in South Florida.
Hur distinguished between Biden’s behavior and Trump’s in his report on Thursday.
“With one exception, there is no record of the Justice Department prosecuting a former president or vice president for mishandling confidential documents from his own administration,” Hur wrote.
“The exception is former President Trump. “It is not our job to adjudicate the criminal charges pending against Mr. Trump, but several key differences between Mr. Trump’s case and Mr. Biden’s are clear,” wrote Hur, who served as Trump’s appointee and U.S. attorney for Maryland from 2018 to 2021.
“Contrary to the evidence involving Mr. Biden, the allegations set forth in the indictment against Mr. Trump, if proven, would clearly establish not only Mr. Trump’s intent but also serious aggravating facts.”
Trump had hundreds more secret documents than Biden – more than 300 in total, including 102 seized in an FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago vacation home in August 2022.
Jack Smith, the U.S. Department of Justice special agent prosecuting the former president, has alleged that Trump, along with others, took steps to try to hide those documents from government officials who had previously searched the property.
But Trump, in a statement on Thursday, seized on Hur’s decision not to indict Biden as evidence of a “two-tier justice system” and said he was the victim of “unconstitutional selective prosecution.”
“The Biden Documents case is 100 times different and more serious than mine,” Trump said.
“I didn’t do anything wrong and I cooperated a lot more.”
A “historical figure”
Hur’s report said the materials recovered from Biden’s home spanned his career in national office from 1973, when he became a U.S. senator from Delaware, and across his two terms as vice president under former President Barack Obama from 2009 to early 2017.
Biden has “long seen himself as a historical figure” throughout his career and during that time has collected papers and artifacts related to “significant themes and events in his career,” the report said.
“He used these materials to write memoirs, published in 2007 and 2017, to document his legacy and cite as evidence that he was a man of presidential talent,” Hur wrote.
“As Vice President, Mr. Biden received and stored classified information at the White House, at his official residence at the Naval Observatory, at his private home in Delaware, and – very briefly – at his rental home in Virginia,” the report said. “He relied on employees to assist in the delivery, storage and retrieval of these classified materials.
“Mr. Biden was known to remove classified materials from his briefing books and preserve them for later use, and his staff struggled — and sometimes failed — to retrieve these materials,” Hur wrote.
“These gaps in tracking and retrieval of Mr. Biden’s classified materials made it more difficult to determine when, how and why many of the classified documents later found at Mr. Biden’s home and think tank ended up where they did not belong.”
The report includes photos of Biden’s cluttered garage at his Wilmington home, where some of the classified material was found in cardboard boxes.
“The Afghanistan documents were eventually found at Mr. Biden’s home in Delaware: in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken one wrapped in duct tape Lamp, flowerpot soil and synthetic firewood,” the report said.
Biden’s attorney Richard Sauber said in a statement: “We are pleased that this investigation has concluded and that the special counsel [Hur] determined that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” even if the President were not in office and a private citizen.”
Sauber said the report recognized that Biden “fully cooperated” from the beginning of the investigation and that his team “immediately self-reported that classified documents were found” and returned them to the government.
“The simple truth is that President Biden takes confidential information seriously and strives to protect it,” Sauber said. “He has spent decades at the highest levels of government defending and advancing America’s national security and foreign policy interests and protecting its secrets.”
Sauber said Biden disagreed with a number of inaccurate and inappropriate comments in the report.
Source link
2024-02-08 22:12:02
www.cnbc.com
