US President Joe Biden can breathe a little easier.
Special prosecutor Robert Hur will not press charges against him for taking official documents, including some classified as confidential, from the time he was a senator or vice president to a private office and to his home.
Biden thus avoids becoming the first sitting United States president charged with a possible crime.
His predecessor, Donald Trump, is accused of 91 crimes in four different criminal cases, including one for classified papers that he took to Mar-a-Lago, his mansion in Palm Beach (Florida).
Although he will not press charges, the special counsel's report criticizes Biden for his handling of classified documents and maintains that his practices “present serious risks to national security.”
“Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden withheld and voluntarily disclosed classified material after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” the report said, but the evidence “does not establish Mr. Biden's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt,” indicates the report.
According to the document, which has been delivered to Congress by the Department of Justice, FBI agents recovered the documents “from the garage, offices and basement of Mr. Biden's home in Wilmington, Delaware.”
Biden also kept “classified notebooks in unsecured and unauthorized spaces in these homes in Virginia and Delaware.”
The material included “marked classified documents on military and foreign policy in Afghanistan and notebooks containing handwritten notes by Mr. Biden on national security and foreign policy issues involving sensitive intelligence sources and methods.”
Biden's exoneration is, in part, devastating: "Mr. Biden would probably present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a nice, well-intentioned, elderly man with a bad memory," says the special prosecutor, who adds that many jurors would therefore have “a reasonable doubt” about his guilt.
It would be difficult to convince a jury after Biden left office that “a former president well into his eighties” was guilty of a serious crime that “requires a willful state of mind.”
double standard
Trump and his supporters level accusations of political persecution and double standards against the Justice Department, although the circumstances of the Biden papers case are very different from those of the Trump case.
What happened with the current president has more parallels with the case of Trump's vice president, Mike Pence, who had also taken papers to his house and was exonerated.
But, without a doubt, the report of prosecutor Hur, appointed at the time by Trump, becomes a lifeline for the former president's defense, although it also marks the differences between the two cases.
According to the report, Biden went so far as to say, “Every president before me has done exactly the same thing.”
Hur instead notes that “most notably, after being given multiple opportunities to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite.”
“According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by recruiting others to destroy evidence and then lying about it,” he adds.
“To the contrary, Mr. Biden provided classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations, including his homes, submitted to a voluntary interview, and otherwise cooperated with the investigation,” explains the special prosecutor.
Trump withheld a huge volume of documentation, including important defense-related secrets, ignored requests to return the papers when he was discovered, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) ended up raiding his mansion by surprise, seizing secret documents that he had tried to hide. .
Instead, Biden and Pence reported on their own initiative that they had discovered the papers they were holding and voluntarily agreed to have their homes searched without the need for a court order.
The first documents Biden improperly retained in his possession were discovered when the president's personal lawyers were packing up files kept in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, a
think tank
dependent on the University of Pennsylvania in Washington.
Biden periodically used this space from mid-2017 until the start of the 2020 presidential election campaign.
The documents were discovered on November 2, 2022. That same day, the Office of the White House Counsel notified the National Archives, which took possession of the materials the following morning.
The discovery, therefore, occurred days before the legislative elections of November 8, but was not made public then until January 9.
“People know that I take documents with classified information seriously,” he said on a visit to Mexico, where he was when the news broke.
“They found some documents in a box, in a closed closet, and as soon as they did so they realized that there were several classified documents in that box.
And they did what they had to: immediately call the [National] Archives and give them to them,” he continued.
“I was informed of this discovery and I was surprised to learn that there are government records that were taken to that office, but I don't know what is in the documents,” he added.
He did not clarify in that appearance that his lawyers had already found a second batch of classified documents on December 20 of last year in a room next to the garage of his home in Wilmington (Delaware).
Attorney General Merrick Garland revealed this new discovery on January 12 while announcing the appointment of lawyer Robert Hur, who worked between 2018 and 2021 as a Maryland State Attorney, as special prosecutor in the case to investigate “the possible unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or other records.”
The following week, on January 20, FBI agents under the orders of the Department of Justice were searching Biden's house, from 9:45 in the morning until 10:30 at night.
It was an agreed search, without a requirement or court order, but rather offered voluntarily by Biden and his lawyers.
In those almost 13 hours of thoroughly reviewing the president's belongings, the agents found new documents with confidential classification marks and annexed materials from both the time when Biden was a senator and when he was vice president, according to his personal lawyer. .
They took possession of them and also took some of Biden's handwritten notes from the years he was vice president (2009 to 2017).
There was still another agreed search, that of Biden's beach house, in Rehoboth Beach (Delaware), although in this case no document with the classified seal appeared, although the agents took some materials and documents for a more detailed analysis. handwritten notes that looked like they were from his time as vice president.
Biden immediately downplayed the issue.
“As far as I know, the type of things they picked up were things from 1974 and lost papers,” he said in a television interview in February.
“When they packed up my offices to move them, they didn't do the kind of work that should have been done to thoroughly review each piece of documentation,” she added.
The case of Biden's classified papers and that of Trump are very different.
However, the fact that for two cases that have similarities Trump is charged and Biden exonerated is fuel for the fire of accusations of political use of justice less than a year before a presidential election that, barring any surprise, they will face again. to both candidates.
[Breaking news.
There will be an update soon]
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