The victim or deceased individual mentioned in the text is not specified. : “Special Counsel’s Report on Biden: 5 Key Takeaways on Classified Documents”

Accident – Death – Obituary News : WASHINGTON — Special Counsel Robert Hur’s nearly 400-page report on the classified documents that President Joe Biden kept after leaving office includes new details on why it’s become commonplace for politicians to end up with sensitive information after they leave their posts. The report also sheds light on why Biden, then a former vice president, shared private information with a ghostwriter, a practice that’s become ubiquitous for high-profile individuals who want to publish a book without actually writing it themselves.

In total, the report includes an executive summary, 17 chapters, a conclusion, and three appendices, covering a total of 388 pages. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Hur as the special counsel in January 2023; Trump had appointed Hur to lead the prosecutor’s office in Maryland in 2018. He left in 2021 to join the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher law firm. Hur declined to recommend criminal charges for Biden. But there are a lot of new details, including about Biden’s memory, that grabbed headlines, so here’s a breakdown of five key points in the report:

Biden’s memory and ‘superfluous’ commentary

The Hur report says one of the reasons prosecutors didn’t bring charges against Biden was that they believed 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.” Lower in the report, it says that during an interview with the special counsel, Biden “did not remember when he was vice president” and that he “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.” “And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him,” the report said.

Biden at a press conference on Thursday night strongly objected to the assertion he could not remember the date of Beau’s death. “There’s even a reference that I don’t remember when my son died,” said Biden. “How in the hell dare he raise that. Frankly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself it wasn’t any of their damn business.” Special Counsel to the President Richard Sauber and Bob Bauer, personal counsel to Biden, vehemently rejected all characterizations of Biden’s memory loss in a letter to the special counsel, urging him to amend the report before releasing it publicly.

Ronald Reagan and precedent for holding onto classified materials after leaving office

Biden is far from the first former executive branch official to keep hold of classified or sensitive materials after leaving office, instead of transferring those documents to the National Archives, according to the report. The report says the “clearest example” is former President Ronald Reagan, a Republican who held the Oval Office from 1981 through 1989. Reagan, the report says, left the White House “with eight years’ worth of handwritten diaries, which he appears to have kept at his California home even though they contained Top Secret information.” “During criminal litigation involving a former Reagan administration official in 1989 and 1990, the Department of Justice stated in public court filings that the ‘currently classified’ diaries were Mr. Reagan’s ‘personal records,’” the report says. “Yet we know of no steps the Department or other agencies took to investigate Mr. Reagan for mishandling classified information or to retrieve or secure his diaries. Most jurors would likely find evidence of this precedent and Mr. Biden’s claimed reliance on it, which we expect would be admitted at trial, to be compelling evidence that Mr. Biden did not act willfully.”

Biden’s conversations with his ghostwriter

The report talks frequently about Biden’s use of a ghostwriter, including what information Biden shared with him and comments the president made about having classified information after leaving office. “Mr. Biden wrote down obviously sensitive information discussed during intelligence briefings with President Obama and meetings in the White House Situation Room about matters of national security and military and foreign policy,” the report says. “And while reading his notebook entries aloud during meetings with his ghostwriter, Mr. Biden sometimes skipped over presumptively classified material and warned his ghostwriter the entries might be classified, but at least three times Mr. Biden read from classified entries aloud to his ghostwriter nearly verbatim.” The report says Biden viewed his notebooks as “highly private and valued possessions with which he was unwilling to part.” “The practices of retaining classified material in unsecured locations and reading classified material to one’s ghostwriter present serious risks to national security, given the vulnerability of extraordinarily sensitive information to loss or compromise to America’s adversaries,” the report says.

Deleted then partially recovered evidence

The report also notes that the ghostwriter, identified as Mark Zwonitzer, deleted recordings of conversations with Biden after learning a special counsel was appointed in the case. “After telling the Special Counsel’s Office what he had done, the ghostwriter turned over his computer and external hard drive and consented to their search,” the report says. “Based on the FBI’s analysis, it appears the FBI recovered all deleted audio files relating to the memoir, though portions of a few of the files appear to be missing, which is possible when forensic tools are used to recover deleted files.” The ghostwriter didn’t delete “near-verbatim transcripts of the recordings” and did share those with the special counsel, according to the report.

Documents found near dog bed, Zappos box

Appendix A toward the bottom of the report describes all the documents found in Biden’s office or home, including with their classification levels. It spans 22 pages. The items included a top secret document “discussing issues related to Russian aggression toward Ukraine” that was attached to a memo from 2014, a 2009 document from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence detailing topics related to the war in Afghanistan, numerous biographies of unidentified members of “a foreign delegation” and Power Point slides detailing options for “the distribution and composition of U.S. forces in Afghanistan after 2014.” Appendix B details whether certain handwritten materials or notebook entries included classified information. That spans five pages. Those entries included a 2011 note about a Situation Room meeting with then-President Barack Obama and a 2013 notebook entry about a meeting with then-National Security Advisor Tom Donilon..