Biden Special Counsel Report: Read It For Yourself

Don’t take a talking head’s word for it, or mindlessly share that viral link about it, read the Biden Special Counsel report for yourself here:

Washington Post:

Joe Biden carelessly kept classified documents and notebooks at his home, according to a special counsel report released Thursday that said the evidence wasn’t strong enough to charge the president with crimes.

The report’s description of Biden as “an elderly man with a poor memory” prompted a furious response from the president at a hastily called news conference hours later.

The 345-page special counsel report portrays Biden, 81, as someone who haphazardly kept notebooks and documents with classified information at his home, and struggled to recall key dates in his life. Republicans quickly seized on that stinging characterization to attack the Democratic incumbent as unfit for office.

Special counsel Robert K. Hur’s report also said Biden could not remember the year in which his son Beau died of cancer.

“How in the hell dare he raise that,” a furious president said to reporters summoned to the White House on Thursday evening. “It wasn’t any of their damn business. … I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.”

In an exchange with reporters that veered from questions about possible national security crimes to the president’s mental faculties to the ongoing U.S. response to the war in the Middle East, Biden insisted he never improperly shared classified information with anyone and was fit to be president and run for reelection.

“I know what the hell I’m doing,” he declared.

Hur, who interviewed the president at the White House himself, found evidence that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials to his ghost writer after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” The special counsel concluded, however, that the evidence “does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” At the news conference, Biden denied disclosing restricted information, saying he was careful to skip over any sensitive material when sharing his notes.

Prosecuting Biden would be “unwarranted” based on a number of factors that would make it difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he intended to break the law, Hur’s report concluded.

Among the issues examined by investigators was why Biden first told his ghostwriter that he had classified information in his possession back in 2017 but didn’t report it to authorities.

Ultimately, the report said a jury would find Biden to be a sympathetic figure and “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Prosecutors also suggested it might not have struck Biden as noteworthy that he was in possession of classified documents so soon after his term as vice president had ended.

Hur’s report 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.”