President Joe Biden will not be charged with mishandling classified government documents after his two terms as vice president, the special counsel who was investigating the case announced Thursday.
One reason Biden will not face any further scrutiny over storing sensitive materials in a garage and other locations is his “poor memory” and age, a report from special counsel Robert Hur released Tuesday afternoon said.
While Democrats would like to portray the 81-year-old president as fit as a fiddle heading into the November election, Hur’s report found quite the opposite, NBC News reported.
CNN interrupted its regularly scheduled programming to report on the findings of investigators as Biden pitches to voters that he deserves another term.
JUST IN — The Special Counsel repeatedly stated that Biden is “an elderly man with a poor memory.”
“At various junctions the report mentions the president’s memory issues being a factor. It says the president’s memory is significantly limited.” pic.twitter.com/CoIqDNmKEJ
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) February 8, 2024
The Hur report described the president as both “elderly” and potentially so senile he might not have known what he was doing was wrong when he stored the documents in unsecured places, such as his home.
That could have left Biden in front of a sympathetic jury if he was to go to trial, the report said.
However, it did say the president willfully and negligently mishandled government secrets before he was inaugurated in 2021.
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“Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” Hur’s report said.
The report added that although investigators found a mountain of evidence, it did not “establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
It described the president as having been “significantly limited” during his interviews with federal agents.
“We 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,” the report said.
“Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt,” it 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.”
Investigators described Biden’s memory recently as having gotten “worse” since 2017 interviews.
The special counsel’s report delved deeper into the president’s memory issues, saying 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?’).”
It also said Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
Attorneys for the president had sent a letter to Hur this week in which they took issue with the report’s characterization of his memory.
Biden’s lawyers Richard Sauber and Bob Bauer called the report “prejudicial.”
