Biden says he never intended to keep classified documents, Hur stands by report on president’s memory
In a more than five-hour interview, President Joe Biden repeatedly told a special counsel that he never intended to retain classified information after leaving the vice presidency, but he was vague at times about dates and He said he was unfamiliar with the paper trail for some. He handled sensitive documents. The Associated Press reviewed a transcript of the Biden interviews that was being turned over to Congress by the Justice Department on Tuesday, hours before the special counsel, Robert Hur, is to face questions about the House Judiciary’s investigation of the Democratic president. Were going before the committee. ,
Hur concluded in his report that Biden should not face criminal charges for mishandling documents, but he also raised questions about the president’s age and competence. The Special Counsel, for his part, stood by his accurate and impartial assessment of the President’s memory in prepared testimony to Congress. In prepared remarks, Hur said: “What I have written is what I believe the evidence shows, and I hope jurors will understand and believe it. I didn’t make my explanation clear. “Nor did I unfairly criticize the President,” he said.
While Biden got some details wrong in his interview, the full transcript could raise questions about Hoer’s portrayal of the 81-year-old president because of significant limitations on his memory. Also, it clarifies that Republican lawyers never asked Biden about the timing of his son’s death, which contradicts the president’s angry public objections to the alleged line of questioning.
Both the hearing and the transcript were intended to address pending questions about Hur’s report on the discovery of certain classified records in Biden’s home and former Washington private office. But there was no guarantee they would change preconceived notions about the president or the Trump appointees who investigated them, especially in a tough election year.
On Capitol Hill, Hur appeared in a rare witness stand, likely to be censured by Republicans angered by his decision not to impeach the president and by Democrats angered by his unflattering remarks about Biden. Republicans are likely to dig deeper into Hur’s assessment of the president’s age and memory as they seek to oust Biden from office in November. Democrats will attempt to portray Hur, who was appointed by Donald Trump as a U.S. attorney to help his party win the presidential election, as a political partisan. Hur’s report cites evidence that Biden knowingly kept highly classified information to himself and shared it with a ghostwriter, based on audio of a conversation between the two men in which Biden said he was told by his Some classified documents were found at the house.
In interviews, Biden said he did not remember about the exchange, or that he actually received any documents. He said that if he had discussed anything questionable with the ghostwriter, it was in the context of a sensitive 20-page memo he wrote to then-President Barack Obama in 2009, which argued against a troop surge in Afghanistan. Which he wanted to make sure didn’t happen. In publishing.
Hur devoted much of his report to explaining why he did not believe the evidence against Biden met the standard for criminal charges, based partly on hours of interviews with the president. In his prepared remarks, Hur said he was aware of the need to explain in detail why he decided not to charge the president. Such explanations are common but usually kept confidential; And so he didn’t back down, especially in this case.
“The need to showcase my work here was particularly strong,” he said. “The Attorney General had appointed me to investigate the actions of the Attorney General’s boss, the sitting President of the United States. I knew that to make my decision credible, I could not simply announce that I recommended no criminal charges and leave it at that. I needed to explain why.
Hur warned that he would not discuss investigative steps or divert attention from the content of the report. He said the evidence and the president himself put his memory directly at issue. In the report, Hur said it may be difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Biden intended to keep the documents, which is the standard for a conviction in a criminal case. To some extent, he argued, jurors may have been influenced by Biden’s age to make them seem forgetful, and there were likely innocent explanations for any records mismanagement. Hur wrote in his report that Mr. Biden would likely present himself to the jury, as he did during our interview, as a sympathetic, well-intentioned, elderly man with a failing memory.
In his interviews, Biden repeatedly told prosecutors that he did not know how the classified documents reached his home and the former Penn Biden Center office in Washington. He said, I have no information.
He also insisted that if he had known they were there, he would have returned them to the government. The President admitted that he knowingly kept personal diaries that contained classified information according to officials. Biden insisted it was his own property, a claim also made by previous presidents and vice presidents, and that he had the right to keep it.
He also admitted that he was never that organized, as prosecutors pressed him on why certain documents were located in different locations. Hur detailed in his report how his findings about Biden were very different from the findings of special counsel Jack Smith about Republican front-runner Donald Trump, who has been accused of knowingly retaining classified documents.
FBI agents searched Trump’s Florida property in 2022 and removed boxes of documents marked as classified after the National Archives refused multiple requests to return them. Biden, by his own admission, maintains such a vast assortment of photographs, documents and artifacts from his more than 50 years in public life that he can’t keep track of everything. When asked if first lady Jill Biden keeps her things to herself, he said, “She wants nothing to do with my filing system. He said, I am not even joking about the lawyers laughing.
The transcript offered a rare window into the mind of a sitting president, capturing his humor and his passions, including his beloved Corvette and his keen interest in construction work at his home in Wilmington, as well as the rigors of the presidency and international crises. got to know. Biden sat down with Hur for the first time during the crisis, a day after Hamas’ devastating attack on Israel on October 7.
He had just spoken to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu earlier in the day in interviews, part of a series of calls aimed at preventing the attack from escalating into a wider regional conflict. At several points, when Hur suggested a pause, Biden encouraged prosecutors to move forward, saying, “I’ll be up all night if we get this done.” Biden said he left it up to his staff to safeguard the classified information he was entrusted with, often leaving the papers in piles on his desk so he could sort them and keep them safe.
Biden said, I never asked anyone. He said that most of his staff have worked with him for years, to the extent that they do not need direction from him. “It just – it just happened. I don’t know. I don’t remember who. The confusion over the timing of the death of Biden’s adult son Beau, who died on May 30, 2015, was highlighted by Hur in his report as an example of the president’s memory lapses. But the transcript shows that Hur never asked Biden specifically about his son, as was suggested by a clearly angry Biden in comments to reporters on the day the report was released.
“How dare he raise this,” Biden said of a hero. “To be honest, when I was asked the question, I thought it was no big deal of theirs. But the transcript shows that the exchange was less revealing about Biden’s memory than Hero’s, and that Biden’s memory was inaccurate during his emotional remarks at the White House. Hur asked Biden where he kept the things he was “actively working on” when he was living in a rental house in Virginia in January 2017, shortly after leaving the vice presidency. And in that context, it was Biden who raised Beau while talking about illness and death in a book he published in 2017 about that painful time.
What month did Beau die? “Oh my God, May 30,” Biden said, thinking. Then a White House lawyer mentioned the year 2015. Did he die in 2015? Biden asked again. Biden detailed the story, included in his book Promise Me, Dad, about how his late son encouraged him to remain engaged in public life after the Obama administration ended.
The Justice Department redacted information about others involved in the case, and the National Security Council and State Department blacked out some details related to sensitive intelligence and foreign affairs matters. Before the amendments, the transcript was classified as top secret and prevented from being disseminated to foreign nationals.
(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed – The Associated Press)