The President of the United States, Joe Biden, upon his arrival at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York this Wednesday.EVELYN HOCKSTEIN (Portal)
Special Counsel Robert Hur has completed his investigation into confidential documents that US President Joe Biden wrongfully kept in his possession from his time as a senator and vice president. Attorney General Merrick Garland has informed Congress in a letter that Hur has submitted a report after completing his investigation, most of which will soon be made public if portions of it considered confidential are removed.
Garland does not expect the results of the investigation, but US media announced this week that no criminal charges are expected, only criticism of the handling of the documents.
“As I have made clear with respect to each of the special counsels who have served since I took office, I am committed to releasing as much of the special counsel's report as possible,” Garland wrote in his letter.
Although the differences between the investigations into Biden and former President Donald Trump are catastrophic, Republicans will use the record of Biden's case without filing charges as evidence of double standards by the Justice Department.
The investigation into Biden has been ongoing for more than a year since the discovery of a small number of classified documents in a closet at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement. They were in an office at the University of Pennsylvania-based think tank in Washington, which Biden used regularly from mid-2017 until the start of the 2020 presidential campaign.
The documents were discovered on November 2, 2022, but their appearance was not revealed until January 2023. His lawyers found a second batch of confidential documents in a room next to the garage of his Wilmington, Delaware, home on December 20 of that year. . Attorney General Merrick Garland announced this new discovery on January 12, 2023, when he announced the appointment of Attorney Robert Hur, who served as Maryland Attorney General between 2018 and 2021, as special prosecutor in the case to “address the possible unauthorized removal and retention of “to examine classified information or other records.”
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Also in January, Joe Biden's employees found additional secret reports in the US president's private home in Wilmington, Delaware. Then, on January 21 last year, FBI agents working for the Justice Department searched the home of the President of the United States for 13 hours. It was an agreed search, without any conditions or court order, but offered voluntarily by Biden and his lawyers. After a thorough search of the president's belongings, agents found new documents containing classified memorandums and attached materials, both from when Biden was a senator and when he was vice president.
The special prosecutor and his team analyzed the documents and the circumstances under which they appeared. They also questioned the president in the White House at the beginning of October, but apparently found no evidence of criminal behavior. What happened to the incumbent president has parallels to the case of Trump's Vice President Mike Pence, who also took home papers and was exonerated.
The cooperation of the current president and his lawyers and the voluntary handover of the secret documents is the biggest difference from the Trump case, to which is added the much larger amount of documents that Trump kept and their contents, although this is not known. you know details. The search of the Mar-a-Lago property in Palm Beach, Florida, followed a request ignored by Trump and his lawyers and a court order based on indications of possible crime. In one of the four cases in which he is being indicted, Trump is accused in a Florida court of 40 alleged crimes related to the classified documents, including 32 counts of unlawfully storing national defense information and one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice.
Despite the enormous differences between the cases, the closure of the investigation against Biden will give him rhetorical ammunition to portray himself as a martyr who has been unfairly and discriminatorily persecuted. The former president has included suing for political persecution over the allegations in his strategy for the Nov. 5 presidential election, in which he is expected to face Biden.
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