Biden willfully kept classified documents: special counsel

Hur’s bluntly detailed lapses in Biden’s memory when he was questioned for the probe.

“In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse,” Hur wrote.

“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?’),” the report said.

“He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died,” the special counsel said. “And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him.”

“Among other things, he mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.”

Hur said that he expected that Biden’s lawyers would use these memory gaps as a defense if he were prosecuted.

“In a case where the government must prove that Mr. Biden knew he had possession of the classified Afghanistan documents after the vice presidency and chose to keep those documents, knowing he was violating the law, we expect that at trial, his attorneys would emphasize these limitations in his recall,” the special counsel wrote.

In a letter attached to the report, Biden’s lawyers complained to Hur about what they called his “prejudicial and inflammatory” description of the president’s “inability to recall dates or details of events that happened years ago.” They that Biden’s failure to remember certain information was to be expected given the passage of time.

The lawyers wrote that Hur had not used “denigrating” language to describe other witnesses’ failure to recall years-old events.

Hur’s report said that the materials recovered from Biden’s home spanned his career in national office from 1973 when he became a U.S. senator from Delaware, and through his two terms as vice president under former President Barack Obama, from 2009 through early 2017.

Biden during his career “has long seen himself as a historic figure,” and during that time collected papers and artifacts that were connected to “significant issues and events in his career,” the report said.

“He used these materials to write memoirs published in 2007 and 2017, to document his legacy, and to cite as evidence that he was a man of presidential timber,” Hur wrote.

“As vice president, Mr. Biden received and stored classified materials at the White House, his official residence at the Naval Observatory, his private home in Delaware, and — very briefly — his rental home in Virginia,” the report said. “He relied on staff to help deliver, store, and retrieve these classified materials.

“Mr. Biden was known to remove and keep classified material from his briefing books for future use, and his staff struggled — and sometimes failed — to retrieve these materials,” Hur wrote.

“These gaps in the tracking and retrieval of Mr. Biden’s classified materials made it more difficult to determine when, how, and why many of the classified documents later found in Mr. Biden’s home and think tank ended up where they did not belong.”

The report contains photos of Biden’s cluttered garage at his Wilmington home, where some of the classified material was found in cardboard boxes.

“The Afghanistan documents were ultimately found in Mr. Biden’s Delaware home: in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood,” the report said.

Biden’s lawyer Richard Sauber, in a statement, said, “We are pleased that this investigation has concluded and that the Special Counsel [Hur] found ‘no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,’ even if the President were out of office and a private citizen.”

Sauber said the report recognized that Biden “fully cooperated” from the outset of the probe, and his team “promptly self-reported that classified documents were found” and returned to the government.

“The simple truth is President Biden takes classified information seriously and strives to protect it,” Sauber said. “He has spent decades at the highest levels of government defending and advancing America’s national security and foreign policy interests and protecting her secrets.”

Sauber said Biden disagreed with a “number of inaccurate and inappropriate comments” in the report.