President Biden will not face charges after a year-long investigation into his handling of classified material, but he did not escape criticism.
A year-long investigation into President Biden’s handling of classified material will not result in any charges. Special counsel Robert Hur concluded in his report that the evidence investigators uncovered falls short of «proof beyond a reasonable doubt» that Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials.
Despite the legal win for the president, the report was politically damaging for Biden. It details shoddy handling of classified documents and specifically points out gaps in Biden’s memory when discussing the information during his interview with the special counsel — fueling an existing political concern about his age and mental acuity.
Biden sought to dispute the unfavorable parts of the report in a fiery press conference Thursday night, emphasizing his cooperation with the investigation and defending his fitness for office.
Here’s what you need to know about the report, and the fallout that began immediately after its release. What the report includes
The report covers what materials have been uncovered, what’s known about how they were handled — going back to Biden’s time as vice president — as well as the legal arguments around whether charges were appropriate.
There are photos of the boxes that contained classified materials, including one damaged box with documents about Afghanistan that was found in the garage of Biden’s home in Delaware «near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood.»
The bulk of the report focuses on two types of classified materials — documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan; and notebooks that Biden used throughout his presidency for a combination of personal reflections, meeting notes and other writings.
Biden relied on his notebooks in particular while writing his memoir Promise Me, Dad, which was published in 2017 and reflects on the year his older son Beau died of cancer, two years earlier.
In conversations with his ghostwriter for the book, he read from those notebooks — and on at least three occasions shared classified material while doing so.
In his interview for the special counsel investigation, Biden was «emphatic, declaring that his notebooks are ‘my property,’ and that ‘every president before me has done the exact same thing,’ that is, kept handwritten materials after his term in office, even if they contain classified material.
