Washington (CNN) — The White House counsel’s office has concluded its review of special counsel Robert Hur’s report on the possible mishandling of classified documents connected to President Joe Biden, declining to assert any executive privilege in the report.
The report will now be submitted to Congress.
“We notified the Justice Department at approximately 9:00 this morning that our privilege review has concluded,” said Ian Sams, spokesman for the White House Counsel’s Office, in a statement Thursday. “In keeping with his commitment to cooperation and transparency throughout this investigation, the President declined to assert privilege over any portion of the report.”
In a letter to Congress on Thursday, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the report would be submitted to Congress once the White House counsel’s review was complete.
“As I have made clear regarding each Special Counsel who has served since I have taken office, I am committed to making as much of the Special Counsel’s report public as possible,” Garland wrote in his letter to members of the judiciary committees.
Hur was appointed special counsel in January 2023 to oversee the probe into Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents. Privileged documents were found at Biden’s former office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, DC, and at his Wilmington, Delaware, home.
In the first instance, the documents were discovered by Biden attorneys who were clearing out his office at the Penn Biden Center in November 2022. The White House Counsel’s Office notified the National Archives of the documents, and the Archives took possession of them the next morning.
Last January, the FBI searched Biden’s home in Wilmington and found six additional documents with classified markings. While the search was voluntary, it was an extraordinary instance of the FBI searching the home of a sitting president.
The discovery of classified materials is both embarrassing and politically inconvenient for the president, who previously criticized former President Donald Trump for his own handling of classified documents.
But there are distinct differences between the two cases: the FBI searched Biden’s home with his permission, while the agency had to obtain a search warrant to search Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022.
Nobody has been charged with a crime in relation to the discovery of Biden’s classified documents, while a federal grand jury returned an indictment charging Trump and an aide with several crimes related to their alleged mishandling of documents found at Trump’s estate. Both Trump and the aide, Walt Nauta, have pleaded not guilty.
Biden participated in a voluntary interview with Hur last year, and sources told CNN in October that it appeared unlikely that charges would be filed related to his case.
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James Kukstis
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