On Sunday, the anti-trafficking organization World Without Exploitation released a P.S.A. featuring eleven of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. Each of the women holds a photograph of herself from around the age at which she first encountered the reviled sex offender. (“I was fourteen years old” . . . “I was sixteen years old” . . . “I was sixteen” . . . “Seventeen” . . . “Fourteen years old.”) The P.S.A. ends by directing viewers to call their congressional representatives to urge the release of the remaining Epstein files: “It’s time to bring the secrets out of the shadows.”
This plea may appear to have some momentum. Last week, the House Oversight Committee made public more than twenty thousand pages of documents subpoenaed from Epstein’s estate, and, in days to come, the House is expected to vote on a bill to open up a trove of Justice Department files related to Epstein. But, even if the bill passes the House, it may die in the Senate, or by a veto from President Donald Trump, or in the hands of Pam Bondi, the U.S. Attorney General.
Trump, after months of stonewalling on the release of the remaining Epstein papers, appeared to reverse himself over the weekend, posting to Truth Social, “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files, because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party.” He added, “I DON’T CARE!” But we know Trump cares deeply about anything that bears his name, and his name is all over last week’s tranche of documents. House Democrats singled out a 2011 e-mail in which Epstein called Trump the “dog that hasn’t barked,” and another message, from 2019, in which Epstein invoked Trump’s private club, Mar-a-Lago, and said that “of course he knew about the girls”—presumably referring to girls such as Epstein’s most prominent accuser, Virginia Giuffre, who was a teen-age locker-room attendant at Mar-a-Lago when she was first spotted by Epstein’s main accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. But Giuffre, who died in April, always maintained that she had never witnessed inappropriate conduct by Trump.
And, if Giuffre had made such allegations, it’s not clear that the President’s advocates would mind all that much. The conservative talk-show host and MAGA stalwart Megyn Kelly recently said that she knows “somebody very, very close to this case” who felt that Epstein “was not a pedophile.” Rather, Kelly went on, “He was into the barely legal type, like, he liked fifteen-year-old girls. And I realize this is disgusting. . . . I’m just giving you facts.” A fifteen-year-old girl, if it needs to be noted, is not “barely legal”; there is no U.S. state in which the age of consent is lower than sixteen. In any case, Kelly continued, “There’s a difference between a fifteen-year-old and a five-year-old.” Insisting upon this difference may become more urgent, depending on what is in the D.O.J. files and whether they are made public.
The avalanche of e-mails, text messages, and court documents in last week’s House dump offers various revelations, but, at times, it can also induce a strange mental fog—a wintry mix of amnesia and déjà vu. It’s hard to pinpoint, amid the overwhelm, what you knew and when you knew it. Epstein’s many friends and associates may know the feeling.
I didn’t remember, for example, Epstein’s legal team arguing that he could not be accused of coercion or enticement of his many victims because the sexual assaults that occurred at his West Palm Beach home were “spontaneous.” I also did not recall his team asserting that, because two underage victims may have lied about their age when Epstein met them, “their testimony actually confirms his innocence.” It would seem hard to forget such things, but perhaps it was too difficult to believe them in the first place.
I likewise did not remember that, in 2004, Trump won a bidding war against Epstein for a Palm Beach mansion, an incident that may have precipitated a falling out between the old pals; I did not recall that local police began investigating Epstein for sex crimes shortly after the sale, or that, just four years later, Trump sold the property for more than double what he paid for it, to the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev. This is what is known, I believe, as the art of the deal.
President Trump and his legal team have asked the Justice Department to pay him about $230 million to settle two federal damage claims over investigations into him during both his first administration and the Biden administration, according to a source familiar with the claims. This raises the possibility of a conflict of interest, since some of the top Justice Department officials tasked with settling the claims defended Mr. Trump in those cases.
Both claims were filed before Mr. Trump was inaugurated for his second term.
It’s unclear whether discussions between the Trump legal team and the Justice Department are underway or whether they have occurred, but the paperwork on both claims relating to past investigations into him has been filed, the source said.
The first claim is related to the FBI and special counsel investigation into Mr. Trump regarding alleged interference by Russia in the 2016 presidential election, and the second claim concerns the FBI search at Mar-a-Lago that centered around Mr. Trump’s handling of classified documents after he left the White House in 2021. The claims were first reported by The New York Times on Tuesday.
According to the Justice Department manual, any settlement of the claims would have to be approved by the deputy attorney general or the associate attorney general. Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, was one of Mr. Trump’s criminal defense attorneys. Stanley Woodward, associate attorney general, was Trump co-defendant Walt Nauta’s defense attorney in the classified documents case. If any compensation is approved, it would be paid for by American taxpayers.
“There is such a thing as restitution in criminal cases, but that’s for the victims of the crimes, not for those under investigation for committing one. Maybe this has happened in the past, but it’s very rare,” longtime D.C. attorney Paul Dueffert said in an interview. “I’d love to see the backup on these numbers.”
“It’s hard to imagine how with these two cases you could get to $230 million in legal fees,” Dueffert added. “I could see tens of millions, but not hundreds of millions.”
The claims were first referenced by Mr. Trump last week during an Oval Office event with FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi and Blanche.
“I have a lawsuit that was doing very well, and when I became president I said, ‘I’m sort of suing myself.’ I don’t know, how do you settle the lawsuit, I’ll say give me X dollars, and I don’t know what to do with the lawsuit,” Trump said in reference to the claims, although administrative claims are not lawsuits. “It sort of looks bad, I’m suing myself, right?”
When asked by reporters at a White House event Tuesday about a potential settlement, Mr. Trump said of the federal government that “they probably owe me a lot of money” for those investigations, later adding that he would “donate” any compensation he receives.
“I don’t know what the numbers are. I don’t even talk to them about it,” Mr. Trump said, seeming to refer to whether he was consulting with his personal legal team or the Justice Department. “All I know is that they would owe me a lot of money. But I’m not looking for money. I’d give it to charity or something.”
A spokesperson for Mr. Trump’s legal team said in a statement, “President Trump continues to fight back against all Democrat-led Witch Hunts,” including the Russian interference investigation and the federal indictments he faced before winning reelection last year.
A Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement regarding the possibility of a conflict of interest involving top Justice Department officials that “in any circumstance, all officials at the Department of Justice follow the guidance of career ethics officials.”
“[Blanche and Woodward] were both personally involved in this very case, and you don’t get more of a conflict of interest than that,” Dueffert said. “It’s just unimaginable that they should proceed.”
He called on both to recuse themselves, though he said, “I’m skeptical that will happen.”
Stacey Young, a former Justice Department attorney, said,”This is a clear example of the conflicts posed by installing the president’s personal defense lawyers to run the Justice Department.”
“These same loyalists ousted senior ethics officials who would have helped guide them through the proper way to handle the president’s unprecedented demand for taxpayer money,” said Young, who now leads the Justice Connection, a networking organization to help former Justice Department employees who have resigned or been fired.
On Capitol Hill, GOP Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina said he has “a lot of optics concerns” about the president’s claims.
“I don’t think the president should be treated any differently than anyone else who was maybe a target of prosecution,” he told reporters Wednesday. “Obviously, if the prosecution prevailed, it should be a no-brainer that there wouldn’t be any compensation. If it’s one where the president as a defendant prevailed, … let’s talk about how that’s been handled in the past.”
Before a trial in either of the federal cases against Mr. Trump could take place, both were dismissed after the election at the request of the special counsel because the Justice Department’s longstanding policy is not to prosecute a sitting president.
Classified documents apparently detailing Israel’s planned response to Iran’s Oct. 1, 2024, attack were leaked, House Speaker Mike Johnson said. This comes as Israel continues operations in Lebanon against Hezbollah, and as Secretary of State Antony Blinken prepares for another trip to the Middle East. CBS News’ Ramy Inocencio reports.
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WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange has been released from prison in the UK and will be allowed to return to his home country of Australia after he pleads guilty to illegally disseminating national security material in the U.S., according to a surprising new report from NBC News.
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Court documents filed Monday by the U.S. federal government in the Northern Mariana Islands suggest the plea deal is imminent, though the New York Times notes everything still needs to be approved by a judge. Assange previously faced 170 years in prison.
Why have the court documents been filed in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific? According to the Associated Press, it’s due to Assange’s “opposition to traveling to the continental U.S. and the court’s proximity to Australia.”
The 52-year-old has been held in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison for the past five years, a period that follows a years-long saga that saw Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy while first claiming asylum in 2012. Assange was physically dragged out of the embassy by British authorities in April 2019.
“Julian Assange is free,” the WikiLeaks X account tweeted on Monday around 8:00 p.m. ET. “He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.”
WikiLeaks also published a video of Assange, embedded below, showing him reading paperwork and appearing to board a plane, presumably bound for the Northern Mariana Islands to formally enter his plea.
The Times explains that a plea deal was deemed acceptable to top officials at the Justice Department because Assange had already served five years in the UK while awaiting extradition to the U.S.
The original charges against Assange were brought by the U.S. Department of Justice under President Donald Trump in 2019, despite the fact that Trump would often talk about how much he loved WikiLeaks. Trump failed to pardon Assange before leaving office, something many Assange backers insisted the former president would do.
Assange faced 18 counts of violating the Espionage Act along with charges related to criminal hacking, but the Times reports he’ll only plead guilty to one charge. Assange allegedly provided instructions to whistleblower Chelsea Manning on how to access classified computers, which is what experts claimed was the differentiating factor that made his conduct more serious than a typical journalist who simply disseminates sensitive information.
Some of the documents were published by WikiLeaks in 2011 under the name “Collateral Murder,” including a video from 2007 that showed U.S. forces in Iraq killing several civilians, including two journalists from Reuters.
The plea deal would put an end to the incredibly long saga that has engulfed Assange for over a decade now, though it’s not clear whether the WikiLeaks founder would immediately get back to work. Assange started as a celebrity among lefty and libertarian circles in the early 2010s before becoming celebrated more by the political right-wing after furthering conspiracy theories that supported Donald Trump in 2016.
Stella Assange, Julian’s wife, released a video statement along with WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson which appears to have been shot shortly before Julian was actually released.
“I just came out of Belmarsh prison and what I hope is my last visit to see Julian here in this prison where he spent five years, two months and two weeks. And if you’re seeing this, it means he is out,” Hrafnsson says in the video.
Stella Assange says that a crowdfunding campaign would be launched to support Julian’s “recovery” and health care costs.
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The Australian government and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese made repeated pleas to the White House for Assange’s release, though it was never clear whether President Joe Biden was going to intervene in the case. Assange has reportedly suffered various health issues in prison, though the short video clip released by WikiLeaks appears to show Assange is visibly healthy.
Attorneys for former President Donald Trump on Monday evening pushed back against special counsel Jack Smith’s request Friday that a federal judge in Florida modify Trump’s conditions of release in the probe into Trump’s handling of classified documents.
Federal prosecutors have asked U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the documents case, to modify the condition of Trump’s release in order to bar him from making public statements that “pose a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents” who are participating in the prosecution.
“Trump’s repeated mischaracterization of these facts in widely distributed messages as an attempt to kill him, his family, and Secret Service agents has endangered law enforcement officers involved in the investigation and prosecution of this case and threatened the integrity of these proceedings,” prosecutors told Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Trump.
“A restriction prohibiting future similar statements does not restrict legitimate speech,” they said.
Trump was referring to a disclosure in a court document that the FBI, during that search, followed a standard use-of-force policy that prohibits the use of deadly force except when the officer conducting the search has a reasonable belief that the “subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.”
The policy is routine and intended to limit the use of force during searches. Prosecutors noted that the search was intentionally conducted while Trump and his family were away and was coordinated with the Secret Service. No force was used.
Prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team contended in a court filing late Friday that Trump’s statements falsely suggesting that federal agents “were complicit in a plot to assassinate him” would expose law enforcement officers “to the risk of threats, violence, and harassment.” Some of them are expected to be called as witnesses at Trump’s trial.
But Trump’s attorneys on Monday called Smith’s request “extraordinary, unprecedented, and unconstitutional censorship,” and they said in their filing, “[t]he Motion unjustly targets President Trump’s campaign speech while he is the leading candidate for the presidency.”
They argue that Smith is going further than any previous requests by any other prosecutor in the cases against the former president because the prosecution’s motion ties Trump’s freedom to his campaign speech.
The former president also argues that prosecutors violated local rules in failing to properly “confer” with them before filing the motion. Trump’s lawyers said that Smith’s team, in filing the motion late on a holiday Friday, ahead of closing arguments this week in the separate New York “hush money” criminal case against Trump, did not offer a reasonable conferral period, which they claim is required by local rules in the Southern District of Florida. Trump’s lawyers provided email correspondence between the parties from Friday night as exhibits.
Trump also asked Cannon to sanction the Justice Department’s legal team for allegedly violating the local rules.
Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this week slammed Trump’s claim as “extremely dangerous.” Garland noted that the document Trump was referring to is a standard policy limiting the use of force that was even used in the consensual search of President Joe Biden’s home as part of an investigation into the Democrat’s handling of classified documents.
Trump faces dozens of felony counts accusing him of illegally hoarding at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, classified documents that he took with him after he left the White House in 2021, and then obstructing the FBI’s efforts to get them back. He has pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.
It’s one of four criminal cases Trump is facing as he seeks to reclaim the White House, but outside of the ongoing New York hush money prosecution, it’s not clear that any of the other three will reach trial before the election.
Federal prosecutors on Friday asked the judge overseeing the classified documents case against Donald Trump to bar the former president from public statements that “pose a significant, imminent, and foreseeable danger to law enforcement agents” participating in the prosecution.
The request to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon follows a false claim by Trump earlier this week that the FBI agents who searched his Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022 were “authorized to shoot me” and were “locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.”
The presumptive Republican presidential nominee was referring to the disclosure in a court document that the FBI, during the search, followed a standard use-of-force policy that prohibits the use of deadly force except when the officer conducting the search has a reasonable belief that the “subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.”
The policy is routine and meant to limit the use of force during searches. Prosecutors noted that the search was intentionally conducted when Trump and his family were away and was coordinated with the Secret Service. No force was used.
Prosecutors on special counsel Jack Smith’s team said in court papers late Friday that Trump’s statements falsely suggesting that federal agents “were complicit in a plot to assassinate him” expose law enforcement — some of whom prosecutors noted will be called as witnesses at his trial — “to the risk of threats, violence, and harassment.”
“Trump’s repeated mischaracterization of these facts in widely distributed messages as an attempt to kill him, his family, and Secret Service agents has endangered law enforcement officers involved in the investigation and prosecution of this case and threatened the integrity of these proceedings,” prosecutors told Cannon, who was nominated to the bench by Trump.
“A restriction prohibiting future similar statements does not restrict legitimate speech,” they said.
Defense lawyers have objected to the government’s motion, prosecutors said. An attorney for Trump didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment Friday night.
Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this week slammed Trump’s claim as “extremely dangerous.” Garland noted that the document Trump was referring to is a standard policy limiting the use of force that was even used in the consensual search of President Joe Biden’s home as part of an investigation into the Democrat’s handling of classified documents.
Trump faces dozens of felony counts accusing him of illegally hoarding at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, classified documents that he took with him after he left the White House in 2021, and then obstructing the FBI’s efforts to get them back. He has pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.
It’s one of four criminal cases Trump is facing as he seeks to reclaim the White House, but outside of the ongoing New York hush money prosecution, it’s not clear that any of the other three will reach trial before the election.
House Republicans will take their first step towards holding Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress on Thursday for refusing to turn over the audio recordings of special counsel Robert Hur’s interviews with President Joe Biden.Video above: Special Counsel Robert Hur testifies before House committee about his report on Biden’s handling of classified documentsThe House Oversight and Judiciary committees will each hold markups on their respective reports recommending a contempt of Congress resolution against Garland for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena. If passed out of the committees, the resolutions would next go to the House floor for a vote by the whole chamber. It is not clear when that vote would be held.Shortly after Hur closed his investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents in February, Republicans subpoenaed the Department of Justice for a number of documents and information, including the audio recordings of the special counsel’s interviews with Biden and his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer.While Hur’s probe led to no charges against the president, Republicans have seized on Hur’s description of Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” in his final report.CNN has sued for access to recordings of federal investigators’ interview with Biden in the now-closed probe over his handling of classified documents.Through their subpoenas to DOJ, House Republicans have argued that the audio recordings are crucial to their impeachment inquiry into Biden, which remains stalled as the prospects of the investigation ending in impeachment are increasingly unlikely. Without the votes in their narrow majority or evidence of an impeachable offense, Republicans are now struggling with how to end their probe and are looking for ways to target other members of the Biden administration.Video below: Special counsel report says Biden willfully retained classified infoThe Department has made the majority of the subpoenaed materials available to House Republicans, including transcripts of the special counsel’s interviews with Biden and his ghostwriter, but it has doubled down on its decision to not release the audio files of the interviews, stating that Republicans have not established a legitimate legislative purpose for demanding these recordings.In their contempt reports, Republicans stated that DOJ does not get to determine what information is useful to their investigation, and argued that the verbal nuances of an audio recording provide unique insight into a subject that are not reflected in a transcript.“The Constitution does not permit the executive branch to dictate to Congress how to proceed with an impeachment inquiry or to conduct its oversight,” the report reads.In a recent letter to the Republican-led committees, DOJ Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte wrote to the House Oversight and Judiciary panels that Republicans do not need the audio recordings since DOJ turned over the transcripts, which would address Republican allegations made about the president as part of their impeachment inquiry.“It seems that the more information you receive, the less satisfied you are, and the less justification you have for contempt, the more you rush towards it,” Uriarte wrote.DOJ has also outlined distinct privacy concerns related to an audio recording of an interview compared to a written transcript, and how the release of such an audio file could dissuade cooperation from future witnesses in criminal investigations.Raising concerns that Republicans want these audio files for political purposes, he added: “the Committees’ inability to identify a need for these audio files grounded in legislative or impeachment purposes raises concerns about what other purposes they might serve.”Republicans, meanwhile, argue in their report that while the transcripts of the interviews reflect what was said, “they do not reflect important verbal context, such as tone or tenor, or nonverbal context, such as pauses or pace of delivery.”Such pauses and inflections, Republicans claim, “can provide indications of a witness’s ability to recall events, or whether the individual is intentionally giving evasive or nonresponsive testimony to investigators.”Republicans pointed to a recent example of when a transcript and audio recording of the president diverged, stating that at a speech last month, Biden read a teleprompter cue out loud during his speech, which was reflected in the recording of the event but not in the initial transcript of his remarks.The House Oversight Committee pushed back the start time of its Thursday markup so that Republican committee members can attend the criminal trial of former President Donald Trump in New York City, two sources familiar with the planning told CNN.When asked to comment on the reason for the schedule change, an Oversight Committee spokeswoman told CNN, “Due to member schedule conflicts, the markup is now starting at a different time to accommodate members’ schedules.”
WASHINGTON —
House Republicans will take their first step towards holding Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress on Thursday for refusing to turn over the audio recordings of special counsel Robert Hur’s interviews with President Joe Biden.
Video above: Special Counsel Robert Hur testifies before House committee about his report on Biden’s handling of classified documents
The House Oversight and Judiciary committees will each hold markups on their respective reports recommending a contempt of Congress resolution against Garland for failing to comply with a congressional subpoena. If passed out of the committees, the resolutions would next go to the House floor for a vote by the whole chamber. It is not clear when that vote would be held.
Shortly after Hur closed his investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents in February, Republicans subpoenaed the Department of Justice for a number of documents and information, including the audio recordings of the special counsel’s interviews with Biden and his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer.
While Hur’s probe led to no charges against the president, Republicans have seized on Hur’s description of Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” in his final report.
CNN has sued for access to recordings of federal investigators’ interview with Biden in the now-closed probe over his handling of classified documents.
Through their subpoenas to DOJ, House Republicans have argued that the audio recordings are crucial to their impeachment inquiry into Biden, which remains stalled as the prospects of the investigation ending in impeachment are increasingly unlikely. Without the votes in their narrow majority or evidence of an impeachable offense, Republicans are now struggling with how to end their probe and are looking for ways to target other members of the Biden administration.
Video below: Special counsel report says Biden willfully retained classified info
The Department has made the majority of the subpoenaed materials available to House Republicans, including transcripts of the special counsel’s interviews with Biden and his ghostwriter, but it has doubled down on its decision to not release the audio files of the interviews, stating that Republicans have not established a legitimate legislative purpose for demanding these recordings.
In their contempt reports, Republicans stated that DOJ does not get to determine what information is useful to their investigation, and argued that the verbal nuances of an audio recording provide unique insight into a subject that are not reflected in a transcript.
“The Constitution does not permit the executive branch to dictate to Congress how to proceed with an impeachment inquiry or to conduct its oversight,” the report reads.
In a recent letter to the Republican-led committees, DOJ Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte wrote to the House Oversight and Judiciary panels that Republicans do not need the audio recordings since DOJ turned over the transcripts, which would address Republican allegations made about the president as part of their impeachment inquiry.
“It seems that the more information you receive, the less satisfied you are, and the less justification you have for contempt, the more you rush towards it,” Uriarte wrote.
DOJ has also outlined distinct privacy concerns related to an audio recording of an interview compared to a written transcript, and how the release of such an audio file could dissuade cooperation from future witnesses in criminal investigations.
Raising concerns that Republicans want these audio files for political purposes, he added: “the Committees’ inability to identify a need for these audio files grounded in legislative or impeachment purposes raises concerns about what other purposes they might serve.”
Republicans, meanwhile, argue in their report that while the transcripts of the interviews reflect what was said, “they do not reflect important verbal context, such as tone or tenor, or nonverbal context, such as pauses or pace of delivery.”
Such pauses and inflections, Republicans claim, “can provide indications of a witness’s ability to recall events, or whether the individual is intentionally giving evasive or nonresponsive testimony to investigators.”
Republicans pointed to a recent example of when a transcript and audio recording of the president diverged, stating that at a speech last month, Biden read a teleprompter cue out loud during his speech, which was reflected in the recording of the event but not in the initial transcript of his remarks.
The House Oversight Committee pushed back the start time of its Thursday markup so that Republican committee members can attend the criminal trial of former President Donald Trump in New York City, two sources familiar with the planning told CNN.
When asked to comment on the reason for the schedule change, an Oversight Committee spokeswoman told CNN, “Due to member schedule conflicts, the markup is now starting at a different time to accommodate members’ schedules.”
U.S. officials pledged not to pursue the death penalty against Julian Assange if he’s extradited from the UK to face charges related to his publication of documents highly embarrassing to the U.S. government, according to a report from Australia’s ABC News Tuesday. But that will be cold comfort to some in the British legal system who have argued U.S. prisons are so inherently cruel that sending Assange to America, even with such a guarantee, would still amount to an inhumane act.
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American officials at the U.S. embassy in London reportedly sent a note to British officials on Tuesday in a bid to address several concerns about what may happen to Assange if he’s ultimately extradited to the U.S., according to several news outlets. The 52-year-old WikiLeaks co-founder faces computer hacking and espionage charges first brought by President Donald Trump’s Justice Department that have been continued into the Biden era.
President Biden signaled last week he’d be open to dropping the case against Assange, saying “We’re considering it” when asked about a request from the Australian government. Assange is an Australian citizen, though he hasn’t lived in the country for some time and one of the questions addressed in the diplomatic note is whether the First Amendment applies to people outside the U.S.—an issue the U.S. insists Assange’s lawyers can “raise,” without elaborating too much.
Megan Specia, a reporter for the New York Times in London, tweeted the three-page note on Tuesday including two carefully-worded assurances, quoted below:
1. ASSANGE will not be prejudiced by reason of his nationality with respect to which defenses he may seek to raise at trial and at sentencing. Specifically, if extradited, ASSANGE will have the ability to raise and seek to rely upon at trial (which includes any sentencing hearing) the rights and protections given under the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. A decision as to the applicability of the First Amendment is exclusively within the purview of the U.S. Courts.
2. A sentence of death will neither be sought nor imposed on ASSANGE. The United States is able to provide such assurance as ASSANGE is not charged with a death-penalty eligible offense, and the United States assures that he will not be tried for a death-eligible offense.
Assange has been held in Belmarsh Prison in London since 2019 and a British judge ruled in 2021 that he shouldn’t be extradited due to America’s extremely brutal prison system. The UK’s Judge Vanessa Baraitser cited Assange’s depressive state and risk of suicide in the conditions he would face in the U.S. when she first argued Assange shouldn’t be extradited in a surprise ruling.
“Mr. Assange faces the bleak prospect of severely restrictive detention conditions designed to remove physical contact and reduce social interaction and contact with the outside world to a bare minimum. He faces these prospects as someone with a diagnosis of clinical depression and persistent thoughts of suicide,” Judge Baraitser wrote back in 2021.
The judge’s ruling also noted that Assange could be stuck in solitary confinement for 23 hours per day while awaiting trial in the U.S., a punishment widely considered by other wealthy countries to be torture.
Julian Assange’s wife, Stella Assange, released a statement on Tuesday in response to news of the diplomatic note sent by the U.S. to the UK, calling them “blatant weasel words” that don’t actually guarantee Julian can claim protections under the First Amendment as a foreign citizen.
“The diplomatic note does nothing to relieve our family’s extreme distress about his future—his grim expectation of spending the rest of his life in isolation in U.S. prison for publishing award-winning journalism,” Stella Assange said, according to the AFP.
Lawyers for the U.S. and Assange are scheduled to reconvene in a British court on May 20, though it’s still unclear how many chances the WikiLeaks co-founder may have to appeal any decision that could see him finally shipped to the U.S.
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First impressions stick. After a big story hits, the initial conclusions can turn out to be wrong, or partly wrong, but the revisions are not what people remember. They remember the headlines in imposing font, the solemn tone from a presenter, the avalanche of ironic summaries on social media. Political operatives know this, and it’s that indelible impression they want, one that sticks like a greasy fingerprint and that no number of follow-ups or awkward corrections could possibly wipe away.
Five years ago, a partisan political operative with the credibility of a long career in government service misled the public about official documents in order to get Donald Trump the positive spin he wanted in the press. The play worked so well that a special counsel appointed to examine President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents, Robert Hur, ran it again.
In 2019, then–Attorney General Bill Barr—who would later resign amid Trump’s attempts to suborn the Justice Department into backing his effort to seize power after losing reelection—announced that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had not found sufficient evidence to indict Trump on allegations that he had assisted in a Russian effort to sway the 2016 election and had obstructed an investigation into that effort. Mueller’s investigation led to indictments of several Trump associates, but he later testified that Justice Department policy barred prosecuting a sitting president, and so indicting Trump was not an option. Barr’s summary—which suggested that Trump had been absolved of any crimes—was so misleading that it drew a rebuke not only from Mueller himself but from a federal judge in a public-records lawsuit over material related to the investigation. That judge, Reggie Walton, wrote in 2020 that the discrepancies “cause the court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller report to the contrary.”
As my colleague David Graham wrote at the time, the ploy worked. Trump claimed “total exoneration,” and mainstream outlets blared his innocence in towering headlines. Only later did the public learn that Mueller’s report had found “no criminal conspiracy but considerable links between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, and strongly suggested that Trump had obstructed justice.”
Now this same pattern has emerged once again, only instead of working in the president’s favor, it has undermined him. Hur, a former U.S. attorney in the Trump administration, was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Biden for potential criminal wrongdoing after classified documents were found at his home. (Trump has been indicted on charges that he deliberately mishandled classified documents after storing such documents at his home in Florida and deliberately showing them off to visitors as “highly confidential” and “secret information.”)
In Hur’s own summary of his investigation, he concluded that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” even absent DOJ policy barring prosecution of a sitting president. But that part was not what caught the media’s attention. Rather it was Hur’s characterization of Biden as having memory problems, validating conservative attacks on the president as too old to do the job. The transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden, released yesterday by House Democrats, suggest that characterization—politically convenient for Republicans and the Trump campaign—was misleading.
Sparking alarming headlines about Biden’s mental faculties, Hur had written that 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” and “diminished faculties in advancing age.” As with Barr’s, that conclusion set off a media frenzy in which many mainstream outlets strongly reinforced conservative propaganda that Biden was mentally unfit to serve, a narrative that reverberated until the president’s animated delivery of the State of the Union address last week.
In press coverage following the report, Hur’s phrase was frequently shortened to an “elderly man with a poor memory,” turning the evaluation of a potential legal strategy into something akin to a medical diagnosis. A cacophony of mainstream-media coverage questioning Biden’s age and fitness followed, while conservative politicians and media figures outright declared Biden incapacitated and demanded he be removed from office according to the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which provides for succession in case a president is “unable to discharge his duties.”
The transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden illuminate Hur’s summary as uncharitable at best. As a report in The Washington Post noted, “Biden doesn’t come across as being as absent-minded as Hur has made him out to be.”
Hur wrote that Biden “did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.” Yet the transcript shows Biden remembering the exact day, May 30, after which staffers offer the year—2015—and Biden says, “Was it 2015 he had died?” In another exchange Hur singled out as indicative of Biden’s poor memory, he said Biden mischaracterized the point of view of an Obama-administration official who had opposed a surge of combat troops to the war in Afghanistan, but left out that Biden correctly stated the official’s views in an exchange later that day. The transcript also shows Biden struggling with other dates while answering questions about when he obtained certain documents or in the interval between the Obama and Biden administrations, when he decided to run for president. But as The New York Times reported, “In both instances, Mr. Biden said the wrong year but appeared to recognize that he had misspoken and immediately stopped to seek clarity and orient himself.”
The transcript does not completely refute Hur’s description of Biden’s memory, but it is entirely incompatible with the conservative refrain that Biden has “age-related dementia.” Indeed, both Barr and Hur framed their conclusions with a telltale lawyerly touch that would push the media and the public toward a far broader conclusion about Trump’s supposed innocence or Biden’s alleged decline while allowing them to deny that they had been so explicit.
There’s no question that both Biden and Trump are much older than they used to be. To watch clips of either of them from 20 years ago is to recognize a significant difference. But the transcript shows Biden exactly as he appeared in the State of the Union last week, as someone who has lost a step or two as he’s aged but is fully capable of grasping the politics and policy implications demanded by the presidency. “Mr. Biden went into great detail about many matters, the transcript shows,” the Times reported. “He made jokes over the two days, teasing the prosecutors. And at certain points, he corrected his interrogators when they were the ones who misspoke.” During an exchange about Biden’s home, Hur remarked that Biden had a “photographic understanding and recall of the house,” a remark Hur acknowledged in yesterday’s testimony before the House that he had left out of his original report.
People with serious cognitive decline do not simply have verbal flubs or memory lapses of the sort both campaigns are constantly highlighting on social media. They avoid asking questions they fear might betray their loss of memory; they struggle to recollect the season, the time of day, the state they are currently in. They awkwardly attempt to hide their inability to recall recently relayed information in ways that simply underline its absence. They repeat innocuous statements that they do not realize they made minutes earlier. They pretend to know people they’ve never met and fail to recognize people they’ve known for decades. The late Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the clearest recent example of this in politics, was reported to have had incidents such as a meeting at which lawmakers had to “reintroduce themselves to Feinstein multiple times during an interaction that lasted several hours,” as the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2022.
During his testimony before the House, Hur insisted that “partisan politics had no place whatsoever in my work.” He tried to have it both ways, insisting that his report was accurate while refuting the most uncharitable right-wing characterizations of Biden’s memory. But as legal experts pointed out after the report was released, Hur’s description of Biden’s memory was not a necessary element of his duties, and it is unlikely that someone with as much experience in Washington as Hur would be so naive as to not understand how those phrases would be used politically.
Yet Hur’s report is itself something of a self-inflicted wound for Democrats, a predictable result of their efforts to rebut bad-faith criticism from partisan actors by going out of their way to seem nonpartisan. The age story caught fire in the press, not only because of genuine voter concern over Biden’s age but because this is the sort of superficially nonideological criticism that some reporters feel comfortable repeating in their own words, believing that it illustrates their lack of partisanship to conservative sources and audiences. Coverage of the Hillary Clinton email investigation reached saturation levels in 2016 for similar reasons.
There are more parallels between those stories. Then-President Barack Obama appointed James Comey, a Republican, to run the FBI, in an effort to illustrate his commitment to bipartisanship; Attorney General Garland’s decision to appoint Hur probably had similar intentions. Comey, like Hur, declined to press charges but then broke protocol. In Comey’s case, he did so by first holding a press conference in which he criticized Clinton, and later, during the final days of the presidential campaign, announcing that he was reopening the investigation into Clinton while keeping the bureau’s investigation into Trump a secret. A 2017 analysis published by FiveThirtyEight makes a compelling argument that the latter decision threw a close election to Trump.
For reasons that remain unclear to me, Democrats seem to have internalized the Republican insistence that only Republicans are capable of the fairness and objectivity necessary to investigate or enforce the law. Any lifelong Republican who fails to put partisanship above their duties is instantly and retroactively turned into a left-wing operative by the conservative media. Acting to prevent complaints of bias (as opposed to actually being fair) is ultimately futile: Comey’s last-minute gift to the Trump campaign didn’t prevent Trump from smearing him as a liberal stooge.
These efforts to work the refs pay off. Right-wing criticism of Obama probably influenced him to pick a grandstanding Republican to head the FBI, an agency that has never been run by a Democrat, just as it likely influenced Garland to pick a grandstanding Republican to investigate Biden. Conservative criticism of the mainstream press leads too many journalists to attempt to prove they aren’t liberals, which results in wholesale amplification of right-wing propaganda to deflect criticisms that the media aren’t objective; the facts become a secondary concern.
Fairness, objectivity, and due process are important values, but there is a difference between upholding them and seeking to convince everyone that that’s what you’re doing. Performatively pursuing the latter can easily come at the expense of the former. If you try too hard to convince people you are doing the right thing instead of just doing the right thing, you often end up doing the wrong thing.
Special counsel Jack Smith‘s “clean” record could help remove Judge Aileen Cannon from the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case against former President Donald Trump, a legal expert has said.
Cannon, a Republican, was appointed to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida by Trump during his presidency. She is overseeing the case in which Trump has been charged with 40 federal charges over allegations he retained classified papers after leaving the White House and subsequently obstructed efforts to have them returned. He has entered a not guilty plea and has denied all allegations against him.
Special counsel Jack Smith delivers remarks on an unsealed indictment including four felony counts against former U.S. President Donald Trump on August 1, 2023 in Washington, DC. Smith recently said the judge in the classified… Special counsel Jack Smith delivers remarks on an unsealed indictment including four felony counts against former U.S. President Donald Trump on August 1, 2023 in Washington, DC. Smith recently said the judge in the classified documents case had made a “clear error” that could expose potential witnesses to threats.
GETTY
Writing in her newsletter “Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance,” the former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama said the ruling by Cannon could actually play in favor of Smith and U.S. government. Newsweek has contacted the Department of Justice via the contact form on its website.
Vance, who was nominated to become U.S. attorney by then President Barack Obama, argues that Smith’s good faith approach to Cannon’s rulings may help him in the long run should a higher court seek to remove her from the case. “[T]he government is showing its efforts to comply with the Judge’s orders in good faith. That record of ‘clean hands’ will prove helpful to the government if the case ends up before the 11th Circuit and would strengthen the case for removing Judge Cannon if her rulings on matters this week continue to be off base,” Vance wrote.
Vance wrote that despite the ruling in his favor, the provision of witness names to the defense is not a “clean win” for Trump. “Any use he makes of the information would be highly problematic for him,” she wrote. “So, the government has some small comfort in this situation.”
Legal experts have criticized Cannon’s decision to unseal the identities of potential witnesses. “It’s really one after another, and the way she’s handled this case shows her clear bias for Trump and the defense,” former federal prosecutor Neama Rahmani told Business Insider.
“Obviously Trump appointed her, but he couldn’t have gotten a better draw. Really at every stage of the proceedings so far, she’s allowed Trump to delay—so there’s almost no chance that that trial is going to happen before the November election. And of course, if Trump is elected and he regains control of the White House, the prosecution goes away.”
MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “If information about an ongoing federal investigation into threats to a prosecution witness is not worthy of an ex parte, under seal filing, I don’t know what is.”
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
David Becker, CBS News election law contributor, tells “Face the Nation” that the behavior outlined by President Biden in special counsel Robert Hur’s report is being handled differently than how former President Donald Trump’s allegedly handling of classified documents “mainly because he withheld those documents.”
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The White House is vigorously defending President Joe Biden’s mental fitness after the Justice Department’s special counsel report called his memory into question. Some Democrats fear the report reinforces voter concerns about Biden’s age, and Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, have used it to take jabs at Biden. CBS News’ Christina Ruffini is at the White House with more.
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Catherine Herridge reports on a deadly plane crash on a Florida highway, earthquakes in Hawaii and California, and where the world’s largest iceberg is headed.
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Despite Hur not bringing criminal charges, his report levied what amounted to a political indictment against the 81-year-old president, with investigators writing that a main reason for not pursuing charges was because “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.”
Biden clapped back in a hastily-scheduled news conference Thursday night, just hours after the report was released, telling reporters, “I’m well-meaning, and I’m an elderly man, and I know what the hell I’m doing.”
Full speech: President Biden responds Thursday night to the special counsel’s report on his mishandling of classified documents.
The president’s top surrogates, from Vice President Kamala Harris to congressional Democrats, kept pushing back on Friday, dismissing the special counsel’s report as “politically motivated” and “inappropriate.”
The Biden campaign declined to comment when asked how it’s trying to quell renewed concerns about the president’s age.
A source familiar with the campaign’s thinking told ABC News that Republicans attacking the president’s age is nothing new, saying that strategy didn’t work in 2020 and won’t work in 2024, when the source said voters value experience and wisdom as well.
Here are five ways Biden allies are striking back:
Hur is a Trump appointee and Republican
Biden surrogates have been quick to point out that Robert Hur, a Republican, was appointed by former President Donald Trump to be U.S. Attorney in Maryland in 2018. However, it was Attorney General Merrick Garland, a Biden-appointee, who chose Hur to lead the investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents.
Some are now accusing Hur of having an agenda despite not having enough evidence to criminally indict Biden.
“At the end of the day, it looks as though the special counsel couldn’t charge him with anything, so he just threw the books at him anyway,” said former Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile, an ABC News contributor. “The report read like it was going to get published in the New York Post or on Trump campaign website. It did not read like a legal document.”
Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., in an interview with ABC News on Thursday, called the report’s descriptions of Biden “partisan editorializing by a Republican-appointed prosecutor.”
“This is a Republican special counsel who completely went out of his way to editorialize, to include material in his report that is unnecessary and irrelevant to what he was tasked with doing,” Goldman said, of Hur. “The fact that he’s a Republican and he’s exonerating President Biden, he knows he’s going to be under attack because Republicans want to create this false equivalency between President Biden and former President Trump.”
Illinois Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker, at an unrelated news conference on Friday, deemed the comments by Hur “unfair” and “unnecessary,” also noting he was a Republican appointee.
Governor JB Pritzker and other Democrats defended President Joe Biden Friday after the DOJ’s classified documents report commented on his memory.
“I smell a rat in the comments that were made,” he told reporters.
Hur had no comment.
Doesn’t compare to Trump’s classified docs case
Biden aides and allies say the bottom line is that while the investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents ended with charges, Biden fully cooperated, and Hur decided there wasn’t enough evidence to charge him.
Juxtapose that, they say, to Trump’s case, in which he’s charged with obstructing efforts to secure the documents.
Jim Messina, former President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign manager, urged his social media followers not to equate a “heavily editorialized special counsel’s report” as a bigger liability than the 91 criminal charges pending against Trump. (Trump has denied all wrongdoing).
“Hur, a lifelong Republican and creature of DC, didn’t have a case against Biden, but he knew exactly how his swipes could hurt Biden politically,” Messina said in a post.
“We’ve got to stop treating a single line in a gratuitously long, heavily editorialized special counsel’s report–in which no crime was found btw–by a partisan Republican investigator like it’s a bigger liability than Trump’s 91 criminal charges and being found liable for rape,” he said in another.
Lauren Glassberg has the latest.
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, also highlighted on social media Friday the differences between Trump and Biden’s respective investigations.
“Read the documents. It’s not hard. Biden fully cooperated. Trump obstructed at every turn,” he said in a post. “They know this. And they know how damaging their arguments are to Americans’ confidence in their democracy.”
While Trump’s popularity among Republican voters has risen with each criminal indictment, according to his national polling average on 538, Biden’s mishandling of documents might not be as easily accepted by his base.
There’s also a gap when it comes to perceptions of Trump, 77, and Biden, 81. A recent NBC News poll found 62% of voters have “major concerns” about Biden’s age whereas only 34% have “major concerns” about Trump’s age.
The special counsel has no business making ‘gratuitous’ statements
“Gratuitous” is swiftly becoming a buzzword for Democrats to describe the language they take issue with in Hur’s report.
“The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized, could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly, politically motivated, gratuitous,” said Vice President Kamala Harris, a former federal prosecutor. “When it comes to the role and responsibility of a prosecutor in a situation like that, we should expect that there will be a higher level of integrity than what we saw,” she added.
The Democratic National Committee War Room on Friday blasted a press email listing nearly a dozen instances of other prosecutors and legal experts questioning whether Hur’s comments on Biden’s memory were appropriate, with the email characterizing them as “political cheap shots that came straight from MAGA Republican talking points.”
Among the voices was former Obama Attorney General Eric Holder, who said in a post on X that the report had “many gratuitous remarks and is flatly inconsistent with long standing DOJ traditions.”
Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House counsel’s office, was among the first to characterize Hur’s criticisms of Biden’s memory as “inaccurate, gratuitous and wrong.”
Recounting personal Biden stories about mental agility
Biden allies are also offering first-hand accounts of Biden’s sharpness as they face renewed questions about his mental acuity.
Goldman has recounted in multiple interviews how he spoke with Biden the day before the president’s voluntary interview with the special counsel on Oct. 8, the day after Hamas attacked Israel.
“He was incredibly on point. His recall, his knowledge of a very tricky geopolitical situation was remarkable right off the bat. And he had spoken to a number of leaders, and he knew exactly where the pressure points were,” Goldman said. “And that’s where his age is so beneficial because he has 50 years of foreign policy experience.”
DNC Chair Jaime Harrison also shared his Biden story in a post, moments after the president’s impromptu Thursday night news conference.
“On AF1 I chatted with him on a myriad of topics from politics to family. Saw him bring down the house in SC talking about the promises made and the promises kept!” Harrison assured his followers.
Other Democrats are flatly stating the undeniable truth: Biden is old.
But so, they add, is Trump.
“President Biden and former President Donald Trump have both old, and if that’s the only issue in the 2024 campaign, then the American people will have to judge between two elderly men,” Brazile said. “The president has has acknowledged that he is an elderly man, and he also has acknowledged that he’s still up to doing the work on behalf of the American people. I don’t know what else we can say.”
Special counsel Robert Hur will not charge President Joe Biden for his handling of classified documents while out of office despite willful retention.
The youngest member of Congress, Rep. Maxwell Frost, D-Fla., in a press call for the Biden-Harris campaign on an unrelated topic on Friday, flatly acknowledged Biden “is old” but deflected to the administration’s record, which he said is what Democrats will run on.
“Number one, yes. OK. President Biden is old. OK. Yeah. It doesn’t sound like breaking news to me,” said Frost, who is 27. “When it comes down to how this is gonna impact folks down ballot and how Joe Biden’s candidacy will impact folks down ballot, I see nothing but positivity — because we’re looking at an agenda and we’re looking at a record that is positive.”
Biden isn’t the only one confusing names – so are Trump and Johnson
The report alleging Biden couldn’t recall the years he served as vice president or when his son, Beau, died, followed the president twice this week confusing European leaders with their dead predecessors — instances his allies are dismissing as common mistakes.
“If he had a momentary blip where he couldn’t remember, as his mind is racing from the war in the Middle East to the questions that he’s been asking, I think that’s understandable for any of us,” Goldman told ABC News Live.
After Biden mistakenly called Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi the president of Mexico during his news conference, surrogates were quick to pounce on the fact that Biden isn’t the only big-name politician to recently confuse a name.
Goldman called it “nit-picking” and “inappropriate,” he said, “unless you’re also going to do it with Speaker Mike Johnson or anyone else who makes a mistake.”
Notably, the House speaker confused Iran with Israel last week on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, and Trump, at a rally last month, twice mentioned Nikki Haley when he meant Nancy Pelosi. Trump has also repeatedly confused former President Barack Obama with Biden at recent rallies.
John Dickerson reports on a Trump ballot eligibility case before the Supreme Court, the DOJ refusing to charge President Biden over his handling of classified documents, and how Las Vegas is preparing to welcome hundreds of thousands of Super Bowl fans.
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A special counsel report released Thursday found evidence that President Joe Biden willfully retained and shared highly classified information when he was a private citizen, including about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, but concluded that criminal charges were not warranted.
The report from special counsel Robert Hur resolves a criminal investigation that had shadowed Biden’s presidency for the last year. But its bitingly critical assessment of his handling of sensitive government records and unflattering characterizations of his memory will spark fresh questions about his competency and age that cut at voters’ most deep-seated concerns about his candidacy for re-election.
Beyond that, the harsh findings will almost certainly blunt his ability to forcefully condemn Donald Trump, Biden’s likely opponent in November’s presidential election, over a criminal indictment charging the former president with illegally hoarding classified records at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. Despite abundant differences between the cases, Trump immediately seized on the special counsel report to portray himself as a victim of a “two-tiered system of justice.”
Yet even as Hur found evidence that Biden willfully held onto and shared with a ghostwriter highly classified information, the special counsel devoted much of his report to explaining why he did not believe the evidence met the standard for criminal charges, including a high probability that the Justice Department would not be able to prove Biden’s intent beyond a reasonable doubt, citing among other things an advanced age that they said made him forgetful and the possibility of “innocent explanations” for the records that they could not refute.
In remarks at the White House, Biden denied Hur’s assertion that he shared classified information, saying, “I did not share classified information. I did not share it with my ghostwriter.”
He also angrily lashed out at the special counsel for questioning his recollection of his late son Beau’s death from cancer. “How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden asked, saying he didn’t believe it was any of Hur’s business.
And in response to Hur’s portrayal of him, Biden insisted to reporters that “My memory is fine,” and said he believes he remains the most qualified person to serve as president.
Biden’s lawyers blasted the report for what they said were inaccuracies and gratuitous swipes at the president. In a statement, Biden said he was “pleased” Hur had “reached the conclusion I believed all along they would reach – that there would be no charges brought in this case and the matter is now closed.”
He pointedly noted that he had sat for five hours of in-person interviews in the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s October attack on Israel, when “I was in the middle of handling an international crisis.”
“I just believed that’s what I owed the American people so they could know no charges would be brought and the matter closed,” Biden said.
According to the report, the special counsel “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified information after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen. 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.
The materials were found in “the garage, offices, and basement den in Mr. Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home,” the report said.
Read the full report below:
Still, Hur’s office felt that the “evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Notably, Hur believed that at trial Biden could come across not only as “sympathetic,” but forgetful and not capable of the willfulness required to convict.
“We have also considered that, at trial, 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,” the report said. “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.”
Garage box and storage closet of President Joe Biden’s garage taken on Dec. 21, 2022, in a photo released by the Department of Justice.
Department of Justice.
Attorneys for Biden blasted the special counsel’s characterization of the president’s memory and recollections during his two-day interview with investigators in October.
“We do not believe that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate,” wrote Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president, and Bob Bauer, a personal attorney for the president. “In fact, there is ample evidence from your interview that the President did well in answering your questions about years-old events over the course of five hours.”
The attorneys noted that the interviews took place in the midst of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, when Biden was busy “conducting calls with heads of state, Cabinet members, members of Congress, and meeting repeatedly with his national security team.”
“It is hardly fair to concede that the President would be asked about events years in the past, press him to give his ”best” recollections, and then fault him for his limited memory,” they wrote.
Biden, speaking Thursday afternoon in Virginia, noted the differences between his case and Trump’s, and how the special counsel in his probe had decided not to press charges.
“This matter is now closed,” Biden said.
Hur’s report said investigators found documents marked classified from as far back as the 1970s, including a box labeled “International Travel 1973-1979” containing materials from Biden’s trips to Asia and Europe that included “roughly a dozen marked classified documents that are currently classified at the Secret level.”
Interior of President Joe Biden’s garage storage closet containing Senate documents, Jan. 20, 2023, in a picture released by the Department of Justice.
Department of Justice
According to the report, among the classified documents Biden retained were materials documenting his opposition to the troop surge in Afghanistan, including a classified handwritten memo he sent President Obama over the 2009 Thanksgiving holiday, which FBI agents recovered from Biden’s Delaware home and its garage.
Asked in his interview with investigators about handwriting on a folder containing marked classified documents about Afghanistan, the report said Biden “identified the handwriting as his, but said he recalled nothing about how the folder or its contents got into his garage.”
The report lays out that Biden, in writing his 2007 and 2017 memoirs, worked with a ghostwriter, and in a recorded conversation with the ghostwriter a month after he left office, referenced the 2009 memo — saying that he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”
At that time, Biden was renting a home in Virginia, the report says, and met the ghostwriter there to work on second memoir. He moved out of the Virginia home in 2019 and consolidated his belongings in Delaware, where the report says FBI agents later found the documents marked classified about the Afghanistan troop surge in his garage.
Blue folder labeled “Afghanistan” in a box in President Joe Biden’s garage in a picture released by the Department of Justice.
Department of Justice
As such, the report says “evidence supports the inference,” that when Mr. Biden said the comment in 2017, he “was referring to the same marked classified documents about Afghanistan that FBI agents found in 2022 in his Delaware garage.”
The report also said that Biden “created” his own classified documents via his own handwritten notes in notebooks and notecards, some of which Biden brought home with him and stored in “unsecured locations that were not authorized to store classified information– even though the notebooks.”
The report said Biden used notebooks filled with sensitive materials to write his 2017 memoir, allegedly acknowledging to his ghostwriter that some of the documents he relied on might be classified.
“In writing ‘Promise Me, Dad,’ Mr. Biden relied extensively on the notebooks containing the notes he took during his vice presidency,” said the report. The notebooks contained “notes of meetings Mr. Biden attended as well as entries about his other activities during this period. Many of the meetings related to foreign policy and classified information, including the President’s Daily Brief, National Security Council meetings, and other briefings. Some of these entries remain classified up to the Secret level,” said the report.
Hur’s long-anticipated report was released Thursday, hours after the White House reviewed the document and announced that “in keeping with his commitment to cooperation and transparency,” the president would not assert executive privilege over any portion of the report.
Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House counsel’s office, said in a statement that the president’s legal team had completed a review of the report and that “in keeping with his commitment to cooperation and transparency,” the president would not assert executive privilege over any portion of the report.
Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this week informed key lawmakers that Hur had concluded his investigation, which examined how approximately two dozen classified documents wound up at Biden’s personal home and office.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appears before a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Sept. 20, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
The records in question date back to Biden’s time as vice president, and at least some include “top secret” markings, the highest level of classification.
Garland appointed Hur as special counsel in January of 2023, after aides to the president discovered a batch of ten documents at the Penn-Biden Center in Washington, D.C., where Biden kept an office after his vice presidency.
A second discovery of additional records in the garage of Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home precipitated Garland’s decision to assign Hur as special counsel, ABC News reported at the time.
The report stated that “Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023.”
Investigators interviewed as many as 100 current and former officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken, former White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain, and Hunter Biden, the president’s son. In October, Hur’s team spent two days interviewing Biden himself.
ABC News previously reported that sources who were present for some of the interviews, including witnesses, said that authorities had apparently uncovered instances of carelessness from Biden’s vice presidency, but that — based on what was said in the interviews — the improper removal of classified documents from Biden’s office when he left the White House in 2017 seemed to be more likely a mistake than a criminal act.
The White House had emphasized from the beginning that it would cooperate with investigators. Biden himself repeatedly denied any personal wrongdoing and said he was “surprised” to learn of the documents’ existence.
The Hur investigation has played out quietly against the backdrop of special counsel Jack Smith’s inquiry into former President Donald Trump’s handling of classified records, which culminated last year in a 40-count indictment, to which Trump has pleaded not guilty.
Trump has sought to link his circumstances to Biden’s by trying to draw an equivalence between their conduct and calling his prosecution the result of a justice system improperly targeting Republicans.
But records subsequently released by the National Archives indicate that Biden’s legal team cooperated with National Archives officials, whereas federal prosecutors have accused Trump of deliberately withholding records he knew to be classified from investigators with the National Archives and, later, the FBI.
Hur’s report drew that distinction, saying, “Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite. According to the indictment, he not only refused to return the documents for many months, but he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and then to lie about it.”
“In contrast,” the report said, “Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the National Archives and the Department of Justice, consented to the search of multiple locations including his homes, sat for a voluntary interview and in other ways cooperated with the investigation.”
A special counsel appointed by the Department of Justice issued a report Thursday on President Biden’s handling of classified documents from his time as vice president, finding that no criminal charges were warranted. Robert Hur’s report did contain significant criticism of Mr. Biden’s handling of classified information, however. Major Garrett anchors a CBS News special report breaking down the report’s findings and the political implications.
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President Biden seized on the report by Special Counsel Hur to talk about the classified documents crimes of Trump.
What Did Biden Say About The Special Counsel Report And Trump
Biden said:
I was especially pleased to see the special counsel make clear the stark differences between this case and Donald Trump. As the special counsel wrote, and I quote, several material distinctions between Mr. Trump’s case and Mr. Biden’s are clear. By the way, this is a Republican counsel. Most notably, after being given multiple chances, this is a continuation of the quote: he returned classified documents and avoided prosecution here, while Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite.
This is a continuing quote, according to the indictment, he is not only refused to return documents for many months, he also obstructed justice by enlisting others to destroy evidence and lie about it. In contrast, Mr. Biden turned in classified documents to the national archives, and the Department of Justice considered a search of multiple locations, including his homes, and set for a volunteer interview and, in other words, cooperated with the investigation. That is the distinction, among others. The bottom line is that the special counsel in my case decided against moving forward with any charges. This matter is now closed.
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Biden Turns The Hur Report To An Advantage
The Hur report confirms that Biden committed no crime, but the Trump-nominated special counsel used his report to offer an opinionated characterization of President Biden’s memory that had nothing to do with the classified documents case.
The President has turned the report to his advantage even though the White House is unhappy about the subjective characterizations because it gives the President an opportunity to discuss Trump’s alleged crimes.
Biden will have plenty of chances to prove that his memory is fine, but all it will take is one felony conviction for Trump to be finished.
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Photo: Annabelle Gordon/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The special counsel investigating Joe Biden determined in a report released Thursday that the president would not be charged with any crimes for taking classified documents to his home in Delaware in his years between the White House. Robert Hur, the former U.S. Attorney assigned to the case, also detailed in the report numerous instances when Biden appeared to have problems with his memory.
The details of Biden’s classified-documents handling are likely to be overshadowed by Hur’s observations about the president’s memory. In several different passages, Hur paints a picture of Biden as not only forgetful but deeply unaware of when key events in his life took place. Polls have consistently shown that Biden’s age is the American public’s biggest concern about him.
Hur writes that during interviews with a ghostwriter in 2017 and with Hur’s office in 2023, Biden seemed confused on a number of occasions. In one interview, Biden did not recall exactly when he was vice-president and that he could not remember the year of his son Beau’s death. Hur also writes, in language that appears to editorialize, that Biden was “hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him.”
Hur even suggests that Biden’s “diminished faculties and faulty memory,” in his words, was one of the reasons he chose not to prosecute the president. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt,” Hur wrote. “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.”
Hur concludes that at a possible trial, “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.” It was a line that was immediately seized upon by Republicans to prove their point that the president is too old and doddering to be re-elected.
Biden’s team pushed back on the memory issue. Richard Sauber, a special counsel to the president, and Bob Bauer, his personal counsel, wrote in a letter to Hur that “We do not believe that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate.” They added that “the report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events.”
In a statement, Biden himself noted that he sat for “five hours of in-person interviews over two days on October 8 and 9 of last year, even though Israel had just been attacked on October 7 and I was in the middle of handling an international crisis.”
Hur found that Biden had taken home “classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan” as well as handwritten notebooks on national security and foreign-policy issues that involved “sensitive intelligence sources and methods.” The FBI found these documents in the basement, garage, and office of Biden’s home in Wilmington in a voluntary search last January.
Hur declined to prosecute Biden for the retention of classified documents, citing the president’s cooperation with investigators. Donald Trump, who was charged with willful retention of national-defense information, did not cooperate in several attempts to recover the material — to the point that Trump was also charged for making false statements and conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Hur’s report also states that “the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” Several of the documents were handwritten notes related to classified information provided in the daily presidential brief and national-security-council meetings. Hur also states that Biden provided some classified material to his ghostwriter for his memoir Promise Me, Dad. In one recording from February 2017 obtained during the investigation, Biden told his ghostwriter that he “just found all the classified stuff downstairs” at a house he was renting in Virginia.
Hur stated that this recording was the strongest evidence for potential prosecution, but that it would be unlikely for a jury to convict him. National Archives and Records Administration officials have stated that members of every administration since Reagan have mishandled documents in some capacity. Hur wrote that vice-presidents and presidents often get used to keeping documents at home. (The audio of Biden discussing classified documents in the basement was recorded just weeks after Trump’s inauguration.) Hur also stated that the “badly damaged box surrounded by household detritus” in Biden’s garage suggests that he could have forgotten about some of the classified documents, rather than withheld them intentionally.
After the report was released, Donald Trump released a statement decrying the Justice Department’s decisions to prosecute him but not Biden, claiming Biden handled documents in a much worse way than he had. Soon after, on Truth Social, Trump wrote that “Biden took the Documents in his ‘mental primetime’” but otherwise just echoed his previous statement. He later began reposting other people’s messages highlighting the details in the report about Biden’s memory.
Jack Smith took on Trump’s lies and laid out the timeline while concluding that Trump’s legal problems are his own making in a new court filing.
How Did Jack Smith Debunk Trump’s Lies?
Smith spent nearly one-third of a 68-page court filing debunking Trump’s lies about the classified documents case:
As the exhibits and an accurate timeline attest, the defendants’ narrative overlooks the fact that various federal agencies confronted and appropriately responded to an extraordinary situation resulting entirely from the defendants’ conduct. NARA first sought over a protracted period to retrieve documents from Trump’s PRA representatives, whose responses were dilatory, shifting, and incomplete. As NARA attempted to carry out its statutory responsibilities from 2021 into 2022, highly classified documents sat in a ballroom, bathroom, office space, and a basement storage room at a social club traversed by thousands of members, employees, and guests.
NARA rightly involved other government agencies that had equities and authorities that it did not, as necessary to navigate an unprecedented situation. The White House Counsel’s office became involved because of the need to consult its personnel about missing Trump Administration Presidential records. DOJ became involved because of the Attorney General’s authority to retrieve records through court action and later to assess whether a criminal inquiry was warranted—all well outside of NARA’s archival function. And the Intelligence Community became relevant once the alarming fact emerged that Trump’s boxes contained classified records that he had no authority to keep, let alone store in boxes at his residence. Where the defendants perceive “bias,” “weaponize[d] use of authorities, and a “sham referral,” all attributed to an undifferentiated “Biden Administration,” ECF No. 262 at 5-9, the record shows only different government agencies, with specific portfolios and responsibilities, at work to solve an increasingly vexing and concerning problem.
That is hardly surprising, and it in no way, shape, or form supports the defendants well know, that it is false. Rather, the fact that the two cases have overlapping witnesses has resulted in some degree of overlapping discovery production, out of an abundance of caution. But, in any event, the defendants’ mischaracterization has no bearing on the motion to compel, since the Government has considered all of the prosecutors in the Special Counsel’s Office part of the prosecution team, as it has stated in its correspondence with defense counsel. See Exhibit 27. hyperbolic claim of “politically motivated operatives” launching a “crusade against President Trump.” Id. at 1.
The defendants’ legal problems are solely of their own making.
Jack Smith Sets The Record Straight
The Special Counsel set the record straight with a point-by-point debunking that pointed to the evidence that the classified documents case has nothing to do with the presidential election. Smith showed that the origins of the case go back to the end of the Trump administration and have nothing to do with Trump running for president. There were reports before Trump announced his candidate that the opposite was true. Trump is running for president because he thought that his candidacy would shield him from prosecution and potential conviction.
Trump and his lawyers don’t have evidence of his innocence, but Jack Smith has overwhelming evidence that could prove the former president’s guilt.
A Special Message From PoliticusUSA If you are in a position to donate purely to help us keep the doors open on PoliticusUSA during what is a critical election year, please do so here.
We have been honored to be able to put your interests first for 14 years as we only answer to our readers and we will not compromise on that fundamental, core PoliticusUSA value.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
