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A\u00a0special counsel report released Thursday<\/a>\u00a0found evidence that President Joe Biden willfully retained and shared highly classified information when he was a private citizen, including about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, but concluded that criminal charges were not warranted.<\/p>\n The report from\u00a0special counsel Robert Hur<\/a>\u00a0resolves a criminal investigation that had shadowed Biden\u2019s presidency for the last year. But its bitingly critical assessment of his handling of sensitive government records and unflattering characterizations of his memory will spark fresh\u00a0questions about his competency and age<\/a>\u00a0that cut at voters\u2019 most deep-seated concerns about his candidacy for re-election.<\/p>\n In remarks at the White House Thursday evening, Biden denied that he improperly shared classified information and angrily lashed out at Hur for questioning his mental acuity, particularly his recollection of the timing of his late son Beau\u2019s death from cancer.<\/p>\n The searing findings will almost certainly blunt his efforts to draw contrast with Donald Trump, Biden\u2019s likely opponent in November\u2019s presidential election, over a\u00a0criminal indictment charging the former president with illegally hoarding classified records at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and refusing to return them to the government.<\/a>\u00a0Despite abundant differences between the cases, Trump immediately seized on the special counsel report to portray himself as a victim of a \u201ctwo-tiered system of justice.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet even as Hur found evidence that Biden willfully held onto and\u00a0shared with a ghostwriter<\/a>\u00a0highly classified information, the special counsel devoted much of his report to explaining why he did not believe the evidence met the standard for criminal charges, including a high probability that the Justice Department would not be able to prove Biden\u2019s intent beyond a reasonable doubt, citing among other things an advanced age that they said made him forgetful and the possibility of \u201cinnocent explanations\u201d for the records that they could not refute.<\/p>\n \u201cI did not share classified information,\u201d Biden insisted. \u201cI did not share it with my ghostwriter.\u201d He added he wasn\u2019t aware how the boxes containing classified documents ended up in his garage.<\/p>\n And in response to Hur\u2019s portrayal of him, Biden insisted to reporters that \u201cMy memory is fine,\u201d and said he believes he remains the most qualified person to serve as president.<\/p>\n \u201cHow in the hell dare he raise that?\u201d Biden asked, about Hur\u2019s comments regarding his son\u2019s death, saying he didn\u2019t believe it was any of Hur\u2019s business.<\/p>\n Biden pointedly noted that he had sat for five hours of in-person interviews in the immediate aftermath of Hamas\u2019s October attack on Israel, when \u201cI was in the middle of handling an international crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI just believed that\u2019s what I owed the American people so they could know no charges would be brought and the matter closed,\u201d Biden said.<\/p>\n The investigation into Biden is separate from special counsel Jack Smith\u2019s inquiry into the\u00a0handling of classified documents by Trump<\/a>\u00a0after Trump left the White House. Smith\u2019s team has charged Trump with illegally retaining top secret records at his Mar-a-Lago home and then obstructing government efforts to get them back. Trump has said he did nothing wrong.<\/p>\n Hur, in his report, said there were \u201cseveral material distinctions\u201d between the Trump and Biden cases, noting that Trump refused to return classified documents to the government and allegedly obstructed the investigation, while Biden willfully handed them over.<\/p>\n Hur,\u00a0a former U.S. Attorney in the Trump administration<\/a>, was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland as special counsel in January 2023 following an initial discovery<\/a> by Biden staff of classified records in Washington office space. Subsequent property searches by the FBI, all coordinated voluntarily by Biden staff, that turned up additional sensitive documents from his time as vice president and senator.<\/p>\n Hur\u2019s report said many of the documents recovered at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, in parts of Biden\u2019s Delaware home and in his Senate papers at the University of Delaware were retained by \u201cmistake.\u201d<\/p>\n Biden could not have been prosecuted as a sitting president, but Hur\u2019s report states that he would not recommend charges against Biden regardless.<\/p>\n \u201cWe would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president,\u201d the report said.<\/p>\n But investigators did find evidence of willful retention and disclosure of a subset of records found in Biden\u2019s Wilmington, Delaware house, including in a garage, office and basement den. The files pertain to a troop surge in Afghanistan during the Obama administration that Biden had vigorously opposed. He kept records that documented his position, including a classified letter to Obama during the 2009 Thanksgiving holiday.<\/p>\n Documents found in a box in Biden\u2019s Delaware garage have classification markings up to the Top Secret\/Sensitive Compartmented Information Level and \u201cother materials of great significance to him and that he appears to have personally used and accessed.\u201d Hur, though, wrote that there was a \u201dshortage of evidence\u201d to prove that Biden placed the documents in the box and knew they were there.<\/p>\n Some of the classified information related to Afghanistan was shared with a ghostwriter with whom he published memoirs in 2007 and 2017. As part of the probe, investigators reviewed a recording of a February 2017 conversation between Biden and his ghostwriter in which Biden can be heard saying that he had \u201cjust found all the classified stuff downstairs.\u201d<\/p>\n Prosecutors believe Biden\u2019s comment, made at a time he was renting a home in Virginia, referred to the same documents FBI agents later found in his Delaware house. Though Biden sometimes skipped over presumptively classified material while reading notebook entries to his ghostwriter, the report says, at other times he read aloud classified entries \u201cverbatim.\u201d<\/p>\n The report said there was some evidence to suggest that Biden knew he could not keep classified handwritten notes at home after leaving office, citing his deep familiarity \u201cwith the measures taken to safeguard classified information and the need for those measures to prevent harm to national security.\u201d Yet, prosecutors say, he kept notebooks containing classified information in unlocked drawers at home.<\/p>\n \u201cHe had strong motivations to do so and to ignore the rules for properly handing the classified information in his notebooks,\u201d the report said. \u201cHe consulted the notebooks liberally during hours of discussions with his ghostwriter and viewed them as highly private and valued possessions with which he was unwilling to part.\u201d<\/p>\n While the report removes legal jeopardy for the president, it is nonetheless an embarrassment for Biden, who placed competency and experience at the core of his rationale to voters to send him to the Oval Office. It says that Biden was known to remove and keep classified material from his briefing books for future use and that his staff struggled and sometimes failed to get those records back.<\/p>\n Even so, Hur took pains to note the multiple reasons why prosecutors did not believe they could prove a criminal case beyond a reasonable doubt.<\/p>\n Those include Biden\u2019s \u201climited memory\u201d both during his 2017 recorded conversations with the ghostwriter and in an interview with investigators last year in which, prosecutors say, he could not immediately remember the years in which he served as vice president. Hur said it was possible Biden could have found those records at his Virginia home in 2017 and then forgotten about them soon after.<\/p>\n \u201cGiven Mr. Biden\u2019s limited precision and recall during his interviews with his ghostwriter and with our office, jurors may hesitate to place too much evidentiary weight on a single eight-word utterance to his ghostwriter about finding classified documents in Virginia, in the absence of other, more direct evidence,\u201d the report says<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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,\u201d investigators wrote.<\/p>\n In addition, prosecutors say, Biden could have plausibly believed that the notebooks were his personal property and belonged to him, even if they contained classified information.<\/p>\n In an interview with prosecutors, the report said, Biden was emphatic with investigators that the notebooks were \u201cmy property\u201d and that \u201cevery president before me has done the exact same thing.\u201d<\/p>\n Special counsels are required under Justice Department regulations to submit confidential reports to the attorney general at the conclusion of their work. Such reports are then typically made public. The dual appointments in the Biden and Trump cases were seen as a way to insulate the Justice Department from claims of bias and conflict by placing the probes in the hands of specially named prosecutors.<\/p>\n Garland has worked assiduously to challenge Republican claims of a politicized Justice Department. He has named special counsels to investigate not only the president but also his son,\u00a0Hunter<\/a>, in a separate tax-and-gun prosecution that has resulted in criminal charges.<\/p>\n But in this case, Biden\u2019s personal and White House lawyers strongly objected to the characterizations of Biden in the report and to the fact that so much derogatory information was released about an uncharged subject like the president.<\/p>\n Biden\u2019s personal attorney Bob Bauer accused the special counsel of violating \u201cwell-established\u2019 norms and \u201ctrashing\u201d the president.<\/p>\n \u201cThe special counsel could not refrain from investigative excess, perhaps unsurprising given the intense pressures of the current political environment. Whatever the impact of those pressures on the final report, it flouts department regulations and norms,\u201d he said in a statement.<\/p>\n But a public outcome was basically sealed once Garland appointed a special counsel.<\/p>\n Regulations require special counsels to produce confidential reports to the attorney general at the conclusion of their work. Those documents are then generally made public, even if they contain unflattering assessments of people not criminally charged.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n