Special counsel seeks no criminal charges in Biden's secret records case

The special counsel investigating President Biden said this in a statement report published Thursday that he had decided not to prosecute Mr. Biden over his handling of classified material after he left the vice presidency in early 2017, but that he had found evidence that Mr. Biden deliberately retained and disclosed sensitive material.

The report said that Mr. Biden had left the White House after his vice presidency with classified documents on Afghanistan and notebooks containing handwritten notes “implying sensitive intelligence sources and methods” taken from internal White House briefings.

Robert K. Hur, the special counsel, said in his report that Mr. Biden had shared the notebooks with a ghostwriter who helped him write his 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.”

Mr. Hur, a former Trump Justice Department official, appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in January 2023 to lead the investigation after classified files were found in the garage and living areas of Mr. Biden's home in Delaware and its former Washington office, said its decision not to pursue criminal charges would have been the same even if Justice Department policy did not preclude indicting a sitting president.

“We conclude that the evidence does not establish beyond a reasonable doubt Mr. Biden's guilt,” Mr. Hur wrote.

Mr. Hur cited Mr. Biden's cooperation with investigators, in stark contrast to former President Donald J. Trump's behavior when documents were discovered at his Florida resort, as one of the factors in his decision not to file charges .

Although Mr. Hur decided not to prosecute Mr. Biden, his reasons for doing so are likely to raise new questions about the president's conduct and mental state.

It will also provide powerful new political arguments for Mr. Trump as he struggles to discredit the department over the much more serious investigation into its safekeeping of classified materials, which led to criminal charges last summer.

In a conversation recorded in February 2017 in a rented building in Virginia — a month after he left his office — Mr. Biden told his ghostwriter that he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”

Mr. Hur said that exchange was the strongest basis for a prosecution he had found, but that it was unlikely a jury would convict Mr. Biden, given that he had become accustomed to legally retaining documents as vice president , may not have fully adapted to the new restrictions and believed he had the right to enforce them – based on President Reagan's withholding of similar materials.

That the document was discovered in his Delaware garage in a “heavily damaged box surrounded by household trash” indicated that over the years he had simply forgotten he had it with him, rather than deliberately breaking the law. Mr. Hur concluded.

Another reason he chose not to prosecute Mr. Biden was even less flattering. Mr. Hur cited Mr. Biden's poor memory of events during an interview with prosecutors last fall that lasted two days.

“Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a likable, well-meaning older man with a bad memory,” Mr. Hur wrote.

It would be difficult to convince a jury after Mr. Biden left office that “a former president well into his 80s” was guilty of a crime that “requires a mental state of willfulness.”