President Biden retained classified documents related to a December 2015 call with Ukraine’s prime minister after admonishing his assistant to “[g]et a.
President Biden retained classified documents related to a December 2015 call with Ukraine’s prime minister after admonishing his assistant to “[g]et a copy of this conversation,” special counsel Robert Hur revealed in his bombshell report Thursday.
The call between then-Vice President Biden and then-Ukrainian PM Arseniy Yatsenyuk took place on Dec. 11, 2015, just days after Biden, now 81, returned from a trip to Kyiv — during which he pressured Yatsenyuk and then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
“Get [a] copy of this conversation from [the Situation Room] for my Records please,” reads a handwritten note from Biden – who signed “Joe” – on the upper-right corner of a telephone call sheet detailing the purpose and talking points for the conversation.
The document was found in a box at the president’s namesake think tank – the Penn Biden Center in Washington, DC – within a folder labeled, “VP Personal.”
The one-page document was marked with a classification designation of “Secret.”
In the same folder, Hur’s team discovered a five-page transcript of the call between Biden and Yatsenyuk.
“Given Mr. Biden’s handwritten note, documents A9 and A10 [the pre-call talking points and the transcript] have additional indicia of willful retention by Mr. Biden as compared to the other marked classified documents recovered from the Penn Biden Center,” Hur wrote in his scathing report.
