(NewsNation) — A report by the Department of Justice’s special counsel investigating Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents stated that the president will not face criminal charges.
“We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” the report said. “We would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president.”
However, the report also said that Biden did willfully retain classified information after he was vice president. These materials included: marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan; notebooks containing handwritten entries about issues of national security; and information about foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods.
Biden did not “assert privilege” over any part of the report, White House Counsel’s office spokesman Ian Sams said in a statement to NewsNation. This means the president himself hasn’t asked for any redactions.
Special Counsel Robert Hur was appointed to investigate Biden after a handful of classified documents were discovered at his home in Delaware and a former Washington, D.C., office he used after leaving the White House.
In a statement, Richard Sauber, the special counsel to the president, said they are pleased with the investigation’s conclusion and its outcome.
Although Sauber said the White House disagrees with a number of “inaccurate and inappropriate” comments in the report, he added that the decision not to charge Biden “is firmly based on the facts and evidence.”
“As the Special Counsel report acknowledges, mistakes when packing documents at the end of an administration or when members of Congress leave office are unfortunately a common occurrence,” Sauber said. “It’s happened with every administration, Republican and Democrat, for the past 50 years. Now that this investigation has concluded, President Biden plans to take new, substantive action to help prevent such mistakes in the future and will announce it soon.”
Marked classified documents about Afghanistan with classification markings up to the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level were found in a box in Biden’s Delaware garage, the report said. A handwritten memo from 2009 Biden wrote to then-President Obama to dissuade him from sending additional troops to Afghanistan was also found.
In a recorded conversation with a ghostwriter helping him with his 2017 memoirs, about a month after Biden left the vice president’s office, said he found “classified stuff downstairs.” At that time, Biden had been renting a home in Virginia. He later moved out of the Virginia home in 2019, consolidating his belongings in Delaware.
Charges were not merited in this case, because as vice president, and during his subsequent presidency when the Afghanistan records were found, Biden had the authority to keep classified documents at his home, the report said.
The report said that Biden could have found the classified documents at his Virginia home in 2017, and forgotten about them after.
Classified Afghanistan documents did not come up in Biden’s hours of recorded conversation with the ghostwriter, and they were found in a “badly damaged box” surrounded by household detritus, the report said.
“This could convince some reasonable jurors he did not retain them willfully,” Hur’s report said.
In addition, Biden’s “memory was significantly limited” both during his recorded interviews with ghostwriters and interviews with the DOJ’s office in 2023, according to the report.
This, along with Biden’s cooperation in the investigation, will “likely convince” jurors he made an innocent mistake, the report said, and didn’t have an intent to break the law.
“We also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory,” the report said.
There were several references to Biden’s memory in the report — which could have political implications for the president, who is running for his second term in this year’s election.
Alex Pfeiffer, communications director for Make America Great Again Inc., a Super PAC that supports former President Donald Trump, the leading Republican candidate, said in a statement that “if you’re too senile to stand trial, then you’re too senile to be president. Joe Biden is unfit to lead this nation.”
A White House letter at the end of the report, though, called the notes on Biden’s memory “gratuitous,” and said “sweeping and highly prejudicial language” used by the federal prosecutor to describe it “is not supported by the facts.”
Biden said in a statement that the “exhaustive” investigation went back more than 40 years — into the 1970s, when he was a young Senator. He pointed out that there were five hours of in-person interviews on Oct. 8 and Oct. 9, 2023, shortly after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
“…I was in the middle of handling an international crisis,” Biden said of those days. “I just believed that’s what I owed the American people so they could know no charges would be brought and the matter closed.”
Speaking at the Democratic Congressional retreat Thursday, Biden said he’ll “stay focused on doing my job. My job as a President.”
Trump, who was indicted for allegedly mishandling classified documents, said the DOJ not recommending charges for Biden shows “THIS IS A TWO-TIERED SYSTEM OF JUSTICE.”
On Truth Social, Trump said he did “nothing wrong,” and cooperated more than Biden, while claiming what the president did is “outrageously criminal.”
Hur’s report, while stating it was not his role to assess criminal charges against Trump, made several distinctions between the former president and Biden’s case.
“Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite,” the report said.
Not only did Trump refuse to return the documents for many months, according to the indictment, but he also “obstructed justice” by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it.”
In comparison, Biden turned in classified documents he had to the National Archives and the DOJ, sat for interviews and consented to a search of his home and office, Hur’s report said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
This story is developing. Refresh for updates.