A report which exonerates Joe Biden on the legal level, but considerably weakens him on the political level.
Special prosecutor Robert Hur, responsible for investigating the withholding of confidential documents by the US president, published his findings on Thursday.
He does not recommend launching proceedings against Joe Biden, but returns several times to the fragility of the 81-year-old head of state, pointing in particular to a “bad memory” which seems to have deteriorated in recent years.
Joe Biden “knowingly kept and disclosed classified documents after his vice-presidency (2009-2017) while he was a private citizen,” he writes in the 388-page report, but he considers that “an indictment does not would not be justified", believing in particular that a jury would give the benefit of the doubt to "a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a bad memory".
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Candidate for re-election, Joe Biden is already the subject of numerous criticisms and mockery targeting his advanced age and the confusion he sometimes displays, suggesting that he is not in full possession of his means.
This report turns out to be disastrous on a political level, as he is neck and neck in the polls with his main opponent Donald Trump, who is even ahead of him in certain opinion polls.
“Diminished faculties and defective memory”
Certain passages of the report stand out in particular.
During his interviews with US officials, "he could not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview how his term ended, and on the second day when his term began (
in 2009, am I still vice-president
?
He also seemed to have forgotten the death of his son Beau, who died in 2015 from brain cancer.
“And his memory appeared fuzzy when he described the debates over Afghanistan that were once so important to him,” the prosecutor wrote.
Robert Hur points out that the memory of the American president seems to have deteriorated since 2017. He takes as a point of reference the interviews of the American head of state with his biographer Mark Zwonitzer that year.
Conversations “are often extremely slow, with Mr. Biden having difficulty remembering events” and having difficulty reading his own notes.
“During his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse,” assures the prosecutor.
These interviews between Joe Biden and his biographer are cited several times in the report.
The American president is in fact accused of having revealed classified information to him.
But the state of the head of state's memory would partly exonerate him in front of a juror, argues Robert Hur: "Mr. Biden's apparent errors and failures in February and April 2017 will probably seem consistent with diminished faculties and memory defective” which he demonstrated during the interviews.
Classified documents left in the garage
Joe Biden is also accused of having kept classified documents at his home, notably concerning the war in Afghanistan, when he had no right to do so.
They were found in his Delaware home, "in a badly damaged box in the garage", alongside a dog cage, a broken lamp wrapped in duct tape or even potting soil.
For Robert Hur, a juror “could conclude that this is not where a person intentionally stores what they consider to be classified documents.”
It would be “rather a place where a person stores classified documents that they have forgotten or of which they are unaware of the existence.
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BREAKING: These are some photos of the classified docs President Biden stored in the garage in Delaware, according to Special Counsel Robert Hur's report.
Some of these documents included classified information about Afghanistan, the report says.
No criminal charges recommended.
pic.twitter.com/IvMQbJglse
— Bill Melugin (@BillMelugin_) February 8, 2024
The report also emphasizes that Joe Biden was entitled to possess these documents at the time of their discovery, in 2022, in his capacity as president.
However, he was not allowed to have them at home from the beginning of 2017 (the end of his vice-presidency alongside Barack Obama) until his election to the White House in 2022.
Former President Donald Trump, a candidate for re-election, is also accused of having kept confidential documents at his home.
He reacted to the report in a press release by denouncing “a two-tiered judicial system”.
“Biden's documents case is different from mine and 100 times more serious.
I did nothing wrong and I cooperated much more” with investigators, he assured.
The prosecutor, however, emphasizes in his report that, unlike Joe Biden, Donald Trump refused to return the files he had kept after his presidency, even trying to destroy some of them.
Comments “neither accurate nor appropriate”
In the middle of the presidential campaign, Republicans jumped at the opportunity to attack Joe Biden.
“When we do not have the faculties required to be judged (…), we certainly do not have the faculties required to be in the Oval Office,” asserted their leader in the House, Mike Johnson.
“An elderly man with a bad memory does not have to have the nuclear codes,” also declared Kevin Hern, Republican congressman from Oklahoma.
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The presidency reacted very badly to the report.
In an additional note, the White House writes that the comments on the memory of Joe Biden have “no place in a Department of Justice report” and are “neither accurate nor appropriate”.
The hesitations in his responses describe “a common phenomenon among witnesses: a lack of memory of events several years old,” specifies the presidency, adding that the interviews took place the day after October 7, the day of the deadly attack. of Hamas on Israel.
The American president was then in the middle of managing an international crisis, which explains Joe Biden's inaccuracies, the note implies.
“I mean well, I’m an old man and I know what I’m doing, damn it (…) I don’t have memory problems,” Joe Biden responded, angrily, during a speech Thursday.
As a reminder, his doctor had, in a very detailed report published a year ago, described him as “in good health”.
But on Thursday, shortly after his first statements, the American president mistook the name of a foreign leader, speaking of "Mexico's president, Sissi", in reality wanting to mention the Egyptian head of state Abdel-Fattah al -Sissi.
Last weekend, he had already mentioned a conversation he would have had in 2021 during a G7 summit with President François Mitterrand, who died in 1996.