Special Counsel Finds Biden ‘Willfully Retained’ Classified Docs But Won’t Be Charged

Special Counsel Robert Hur detailed in a report released on Thursday that President Joe Biden did take classified documents home with him, but that he should not face criminal charges over the matter.

“We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter. 1 We would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president. 2 Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” read the report’s executive summary of its probe into Biden.

CNN’s Evan Perez broke the news on air and dug through some of the details in Hur’s length report.

“So we just, received this report, produced by Special Counsel Robert Hur, 345 pages, in all. And it details, the, mishandling of classified, documents by the president of the United States. And, the bottom line on this report, obviously, the most important part of it is the first line where he says, we conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” Perez reported, adding:

And he goes on, over 345 pages to describe, the various ways in which documents were mishandled, including the fact, they say that the, that the president willfully, retained classified documents after he left the, the vice presidency, that, he kept documents, in a home in Virginia that he was renting at the time that, during a period thereafter, he was writing a book, and he shared classified documents with a ghostwriter who was helping him produce one of his memoirs.

“One other very important point here, the special counsel goes into chapter and verse, of why, they’re not going to charge, the president of the Senate. And it’s not only because he is the sitting president and there is a DOJ prohibition on charging a sitting president with a crime. What they talk about here is that they believe that, the evidence that they have would not be able to be sustained, would not be able to sustain a conviction if this was brought before a jury,” Perez added.

Hur argued in his report that a jury would not find Biden acted with intent in order to disclose any classified material. The report also included damning details regarding Biden’s mental state and memory.

“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 read, adding that during an interview with the president he “did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (‘if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?’), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (‘in 2009, am I still Vice President?’).”

This is a developing story and will be updated.