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  Special counsel report concludes Biden willfully retained classified information but will not face charges-CNN

 Special counsel Robert Hur released a searing report Thursday that concluded President Joe Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified military and national security information but will not face charges after a year long investigation into his handling of classified documents.

“We concluded that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” Hur concluded. “We would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president.”

Hur wrote that Biden believed he was allowed to keep the classified information that was contained in his personal notebooks, concluding that prosecutors wouldn’t be able to prove Biden intended to break the law at trial.

One of the reasons Hur chose not to bring charges, according to the report, was that it would be difficult to prosecute Biden, who could appear to a jury as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Biden also cooperated with the investigation and returned the classified documents once they were discovered, Hur wrote — noting the significant differences between this case and the charges against former President Donald Trump.

The special counsel investigation found that Biden knew about the classified documents in his home as far back as 2017, when he was no longer vice president, and that he shared some of the information with the ghostwriter for his memoir published that year.

The public release of the 345-page report marks the conclusion of Hur’s investigation.

The report’s findings are likely to draw harsh criticism from Trump and his allies in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election. Republicans have long drawn parallels between Hur’s investigation and that of special counsel Jack Smith, who last year brought charges against the former president related to his handling of classified documents after he left the White House, despite critical differences in the two cases.

According to the report, “FBI agents recovered these materials from the garage, offices, and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home.”

The materials included “marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan and notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence source and methods.”

According to the report, investigators found Biden’s “memory was significantly limited” in interviews they conducted with the then-president in 2023 as well as interviews with his ghostwriter.

Because of that, Hur wrote in the report, investigators concluded that 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.”

“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,” they wrote, adding that Biden “is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt.”

A White House official noted that Biden was interviewed just days after Israel was raided in October which was occupying his time.

Hur also wrote that the government did not believe it could prove that Biden “intended to do something the law forbids.”

Biden was “emphatic,” according to the report, that his handwritten notebooks containing classified information were his property, saying in his interview with the special counsel’s office that “every president before me has done the exact same thing.”