The White House is asking reporters to reframe their coverage of bombshell revelations from special counsel Robert Hur’s final report on his investigation into President Biden’s mishandling of classified information.
White House spokesman Ian Sams wrote a letter to members of the White House Correspondents Association Tuesday evening informing reporters they have supposedly misstated the findings from Hur’s report by suggesting Hur concluded Biden willfully retained classified documents.
“Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” Hur’s report begins.
“These materials included (1) marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and (2) notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods,” he adds.
Sams’s letter cites several headlines that appear to be based on the beginning of Hur’s report. He accuses reporters of incorrectly covering the substance of the special counsel’s findings by ignoring conclusions arrived at in the later parts of Hur’s roughly 400-page long account of his investigation into Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents.
“This appears to be what the widespread media coverage is based on. Perhaps the Special Counsel could have better written this sentence as ‘found some evidence’ related to these two buckets, but after exploring the theory and reviewing the full totality of facts and evidence available, — not just some of it, the Special Counsel determined that the evidence refuted willful retention or disclosure.”
He cites multiple examples from Hur’s report to push back against the notion that Biden willfully held onto the classified information described by the special counsel. For example, on page 12, Hur asserts that other classified materials held at the Penn Biden Center and Biden’s Delaware estate could have been brought to those locations by accident.
“The FBI recovered additional marked classified documents at the Penn Biden Center, elsewhere in Mr. Biden’s Delaware home, and in collections of his Senate papers at the University of Delaware, but the evidence suggests that Mr. Biden did not willfully retain these documents and that they could plausibly have been brought to these locations by mistake,” Hur observed.
Hur did not gather definitive evidence to conclude Biden knew where the Afghanistan documents were located and intentionally put them in ordinary folders alongside troves of papers from his decades-long political career.
“While it is natural to assume that Mr. Biden put the Afghanistan documents in the box on purpose and that he knew they were there, there is in fact a shortage of evidence on these points. We do not know why, how, or by whom the documents were placed in the box,” Hur said on page 212.
The special-counsel investigation did not find Biden intentionally disclosed national-defense information to his writing assistant, Hur said.
“Therefore, we conclude that the evidence does not establish that Mr. Biden willfully disclosed national defense information to Zwonitzer,” Hur wrote on page 248.
Sams provided additional citations from the report to suggest the investigative leads Hur looked into yielded little evidence to support the conclusion Joe Biden knowingly retained classified documents.
“We understand that the members of the WHCA cover challenging and complex topics day in and day out. Your jobs are not easy. But they are important. When significant errors occur in coverage, such as essentially misstating the findings and conclusions of a federal investigation of the sitting President, it is critical that they be addressed,” Sams concludes.
Hur declined to pursue criminal charges against the sitting president after a year long investigation from January 2023 to February 2024. Nevertheless, his findings regarding President Biden’s advanced age and struggles with memory brought renewed scrutiny to the president’s mental faculties.
“Mr. Biden will likely present himself to the jury, as he did during his interview with our office, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur observed.
The report specifically describes moments where Biden forgot when he was vice president and could not recall the exact year his late son Beau Biden passed away.
President Biden responded to Hur’s report with an angry press conference on February 8th where he confused the presidents of Egypt and Mexico.