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.Hur also cited limitations with Biden’s memory and the president’s cooperation with investigators that “could convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake. The report described the president as “someone for whom jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt.”“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” the report said. “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him-by then a former president well into his eighties-of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”Regarding the notebooks containing classified information, Hur concluded that Biden could plausibly argue if there were a trial that he believed that the notebooks were his personal property and he was allowed to take them home.”During our interview of him, Mr. 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 classified materials after leaving office,” the report said.Other classified documents found at the Penn Biden Center, Biden’s Delaware home, and among Senate papers at the University of Delaware “could plausibly have been brought to these locations by mistake,” Hur concluded.
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