Special counsel: No charges for Biden in classified documents probe

Joe Biden carelessly handled classified materials found at his home and former office and shared government secrets with his ghostwriter, but prosecutors decided no chargeable crime was committed, according to a long-awaited special counsel report released Thursday.

The 345-page Justice Department findings lifts a cloud that has lingered over the president for more than a year, though the criticism of his conduct could still hurt his reelection bid.

Special counsel Robert K. Hur found evidence President Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen” but that evidence “does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Hur’s team concluded that prosecuting Biden would be “unwarranted based on our consideration of the aggravating and mitigating factors” laid out in Justice Department prosecution policies.

To secure a conviction, officials would need to prove to a jury that Biden retained the information willfully.

Ultimately, the report said a jury would find Biden to be sympathetic figure and “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Hur said 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,” the report said.

The special counsel team conducted 173 interviews with 147 witness, including Biden, and collected millions of documents to compile the report. They said that Biden cooperated with investigators and consented to multiple searches of his properties.

Officials said in the report that they would have still decided not to pursue charges even if current Justice Department guidance permitted charging a sitting president.

Attorney General Merrick General appointed Hur as special counsel in January 2023 to investigate the matter after Biden’s aides said they discovered the materials when they searched his home and office. As they reported their discovery to officials, a separate investigation was already underway into former president Donald Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents – a probe that led to 40 federal criminal counts against Trump, including willful retention of national defense secrets and obstruction of justice.

The report portrayed Biden as a well-intentioned, but sometimes hapless and forgetful, a man who had access to classified materials throughout his government career. Biden saved notebooks from his time as vice president that contained classified information, according to the report, and used those notebooks to craft his 2017 memoir with a ghostwriter. The special counsel noted the published books ultimately did not contain classified information.

Prosecutors concluded Biden saved some of the material because he believed he was an important figure in U.S. history and wanted that history to reflect that he opposed sending more troops to Afghanistan in 2009. Biden, the report said, “always believed history would prove him right.”

Some of the classified documents were classified “top secret/sensitive compartmented information,” a category reserved for particularly sensitive material. They included papers that related to Afghanistan, including a 2009 memo he sent to then-President Obama in “a last ditch effort to persuade him not to send additional troops to Afghanistan,” the report said.

The report noted that in a recorded conversation with his ghostwriter in early 2017, shortly after his term as vice president ended, Biden said he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” At the time, Biden was living in a rented home in Virginia.

But officials said in the report that it would be hard to convince a jury that Biden retained the information willfully – a necessary basis for conviction. That’s because, according to officials, his “memory was significantly limited” and that it wouldn’t have been all that notable for Biden to discover classified information in his home less than a month after he left office.

“Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023,” the report said.

Garland said at the time that special counsel appointments were necessary because both Trump and Biden had indicated they would be running for president in 2024.