The special counsel who concluded that criminal charges were not warranted against President Joe Biden over his handling of classified information says there are “clear” differences from Donald Trump’s case.
AP NEWS
Classified documents were found in a damaged cardboard box in President Joe Biden’s cluttered Delaware garage, near where golf clubs hung on the wall. A photo in former President Donald Trump’s indictment, meanwhile, shows stacks of boxes filled with documents under a chandelier in an ornate Mar-a-Lago bathroom.
In Biden’s case, special counsel Robert Hur, a former U.S. attorney for Maryland nominated by Trump, concluded in a report released Thursday that the president should not face criminal charges, despite finding evidence that Biden willfully retained classified information. Trump, on the other hand, is scheduled to stand trial on charges alleging he hoarded classified documents at his Florida estate and thwarted government efforts to get them back.
Trump, who has denied any wrongdoing in the case brought by special counsel Jack Smith, slammed the decision not to charge Biden, saying: “THIS IS A TWO-TIERED SYSTEM OF JUSTICE!” Biden, late Thursday, angrily lashed out at Hur for unflattering characterizations of his memory in the report and said he never shared classified information.
At look at the similarities and differences between the Biden and Trump investigations:
WHAT KINDS OF DOCUMENTS ARE WE TALKING ABOUT?
BIDEN: FBI agents found classified documents about Afghanistan in Biden’s Delaware garage in 2022, along with drafts of a handwritten memo Biden sent to President Barack Obama to persuade Obama not to send more troops into the country, Hur’s report said.
In an office and basement den in the Delaware home, agents also found notebooks with classified information that Biden wrote on during briefings with Obama and in White House Situation Room meetings, the report said. Investigators said the notebooks included national security and foreign policy information that touched on “sensitive intelligence sources and methods.” Hur found that on at least three occasions during interviews with his ghostwriter, Biden read aloud from classified parts from his notebooks “nearly verbatim.”
TRUMP: Prosecutors have alleged that Trump stored hundreds of classified documents in boxes as he packed to leave the White House in 2021. After a Trump attorney told the FBI that there were no more classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, the FBI searched the property in August 2022 and found more than 100 documents with classified markings, according to his indictment. Each of the 32 counts of willful retention of national defense information Trump is charged with pertains to a specific classified document found at Mar-a-Lago that were marked “SECRET” or “TOP SECRET.” Topics addressed in the documents include details about U.S. nuclear weapons and the nuclear capabilities of a foreign country.
WHY DID HUR NOT CHARGE BIDEN?
Hur concluded there is not enough evidence to convict Biden of “willfully” retaining the Afghanistan documents or the notebooks. When the Afghanistan documents were found in the garage in 2022, Biden was allowed to have them because he was president at the time, the report said. To bring charges, Hur said prosecutors would have to rely on a comment that Biden had made to his ghostwriter in 2017 — when Biden was a private citizen and living in Virginia — that he had “just found” classified documents downstairs.
But Hur said Biden could convince some jurors his actions weren’t willful by arguing, for example, that he forgot about the documents shortly after finding them in 2017. It’s also possible the Afghanistan documents were never in the Virginia home at all, but were accidently kept without Biden’s knowledge in Delaware since he was vice president, Hur concluded.
