Special counsel Robert Hur will testify before Congress next month about President Biden having “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” after delivering a scathing report that noted the commander-in-chief’s “poor memory.”
Hur, whom Biden, 81, has dismissed as a “Republican counsel,” is scheduled to appear for a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee on March 12, a source familiar with the matter told The Post.
Following a year-long investigation, the former Maryland US attorney turned in a 388-page report outlining the president’s hoarding of US military and foreign policy documents, as well as handwritten notebook entries “implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods.”
The classified files dated from Biden’s first years as a US senator to after he served two terms as vice president in the Obama White House.
At least a dozen were found to possess top secret information, while others disclosed secret or confidential matters.
Biden stashed the documents and notebooks in cardboard boxes, some of which were turned over by his attorneys in November 2022 while clearing out his former personal office at the Penn Biden think tank in Washington, D.C.
The FBI seized other files from his Wilmington, Del., residence the following month “surrounded by household detritus.” Agents also searched the president’s vacation home in Rehoboth Beach, leaving with written notes.
The report further cited Biden’s disclosure of classified material three months after leaving the vice presidency to his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, who admitted to federal investigators that he deleted some audio files of their conversations after he became aware of Hur’s probe.
Biden, who was making preparations for a memoir that was published later that year, told Zwonitzer that he “found all the classified stuff,” which he held onto because he “didn’t want to turn them in.”
But Hur declined to bring criminal charges against the president, in part due to concerns that a federal jury would see “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
During interviews of Biden at the White House on Oct. 8 and 9, Hur’s investigators found that he “did not remember when he was vice president” and “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
Biden held a press conference the day of the report’s release, in which he railed against Hur and insisted that assertions he willfully retained the classified documents were “just plain wrong.”
“I did not share classified information, I did not share it,” he told reporters.
House Judiciary Committee chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has since asked Zwonitzer to hand over audio recordings and transcripts of his conversations with the former vice president to determine the accuracy of those claims.
Biden also told House Democrats at a conference in Leesburg, Va., earlier that day there were “stark differences” between his case and that of former President Donald Trump, who was indicted on more than 40 counts last year for also retaining classified material.
The FBI seized 102 classified documents from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Aug. 8, 2022, for failing to turn in the material to the National Archives.
Whereas Trump “obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence,” Biden emphasized that he “turned in classified documents to the National Archives.”
When asked about the matter in interviews last year, the president referred to the files as “stray papers” and took a swipe at Trump, wondering aloud how “anyone could be that irresponsible.”
White House attorney Richard Sauber in a statement also faulted Hur for including “a number of inaccurate and inappropriate comments” in the final report, though he cited no specific inaccuracies.
Hur, a Trump appointee whose confirmation as Maryland’s top prosecutor was celebrated in 2018 by both of the state’s Democratic senators, also served as a clerk for US Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist after law school.
He weighed charging Biden’s ghostwriter as well but concluded any evidence that Zwonitzer obstructed justice fell short of being able to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt that he intended to impede an investigation, which is the intent required by law.”
