Special Counsel Robert Hur missed nine boxes of documents potentially marked classified, according to a pair of top Republican senators who investigated the president’s mishandling of top-secret material.
On Friday, Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa sent a letter to Hur, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and Attorney General Merrick Garland demanding details about the classified documents investigation that was ultimately closed without charges. In a report made public last week, Hur concluded President Joe Biden was too senile to face felony charges related to mishandling classified material.
“Biden would likely present himself to the jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur’s team wrote. “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him by — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Johnson and Grassley say Hur’s investigation was incomplete.
“Over the course of our multi-year oversight work, we obtained information from [the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)] relating to its involvement, knowledge, and role with respect to the existence of classified and unclassified documents at multiple locations from Joe Biden’s vice presidency,” the senators wrote. “As part of our inquiry, we publicly revealed last year that NARA had retrieved nine boxes of Biden records from the Boston office of Patrick Moore, one of Biden’s personal counsels.”
“Oddly, Special Counsel Hur’s report did not mention NARA’s retrieval of the nine boxes from Mr. Moore’s office,” lawmakers added.
Johnson and Grassley gave the Department of Justice and the FBI a Feb. 23 deadline to disclose why a review of the records retrieved by NARA was omitted from the special counsel’s final report.
In the nearly 400-page report published last week, Hur’s team outlined the myriad ways Biden mishandled classified documents, with records left out in the open around the president’s Delaware home. Records marked top secret were discovered in Biden’s “garage, offices, and basement den.”
Meanwhile, former President Donald Trump faces a 40-count indictment for the same conduct.
But according to the special counsel, “Mr. Biden’s memory also appeared to have significant limitations” — significant enough to warrant a free pass. Biden apparently forgot when he was vice president and when his son Beau had died. The president’s memory also “appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him.” Biden ultimately presided over the fallout of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan in the late summer of 2021, a debacle from which his approval rating has never recovered.
Hours after Hur’s report was released on Thursday, Biden delivered an angry press conference to condemn criticisms of his cognitive decline. During the presser, however, he went on to confuse the president of Mexico with the president of Egypt, claiming Mexico’s president “did not want to open up the gate to allow humanitarian material to get in” to Gaza.
Biden also misled reporters about the substance of the special counsel’s report, with false claims about the level of classification of the documents he kept and the information shared with his legacy ghostwriter. Biden said none of the records he kept were marked “high classified,” but Hur’s report indicates otherwise.
Biden also said he never shared secret information with his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, who worked with the president on two memoirs. But the bombshell special counsel report said that “disclosure of classified information from his notebooks to his ghostwriter risked serious damage to America’s national security.”
