The Justice Department on Thursday released its long-awaited investigation into President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, delivering a damning assessment that he was an “old man with a bad memory.”
Although the report does not recommend bringing charges against the 81-year-old president, it provides a cascade of damaging findings about confidential files found in Biden’s garage and personal office.
In interviews with investigators, he became confused about the dates he was vice president and couldn’t even remember the year his beloved son Beau died.
And he said his cavalier attitude toward classified documents, such as his habit of reading confidential files to a ghostwriter, posed a significant risk to national security.
One of the reasons they decided not to press charges was because “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview, as a sympathetic, well-intentioned old man with a bad memory.” ‘.
President Joe Biden will not be criminally charged for hiding classified documents in his garage and private office.
Department of Justice photographs reveal boxes and boxes of files stored in unsecured locations, such as the garage of his home.
The report said there was some evidence to suggest Biden was well aware that he was not allowed to keep classified handwritten notes after leaving office, and noted that his long career in Washington meant he was familiar “with measures taken to safeguard the classified information and the “Need for such measures to prevent harm to national security.”
Even so, notebooks full of classified information were kept in his house in locked drawers.
And it wasn’t simply that the notebooks were lost and forgotten.
“He consulted the notebooks liberally during hours of conversations with his ghostwriter and considered them very private and valuable possessions that he was unwilling to part with,” writes special prosecutor Robert Hur.
Biden found himself in the spotlight after his predecessor Donald Trump was accused of illegally storing classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago home.
And Hur’s report will likely undermine the Biden campaign’s attempts to use the charges against Trump in the 2024 election.
Instead, there is ammunition for Trump, with a series of revelations about Biden’s mental acuity. He describes his inability to remember key dates from his career and personal life when he was interviewed by investigators.
‘He didn’t remember when he was vice president, he forgot on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013, when did I stop being vice president?”), and he forgot the second day of the interview. when he began his term (“in 2009, am I still vice president?”),’ he reportedly said.
“He couldn’t remember, even after several years, when his son Beau died.”