WASHINGTON -- Vice President Kamala Harris on Friday slammed the report by a Justice Department special counsel into Joe Biden's mishandling of classified documents that raised questions about the president's memory, calling it "politically motivated" and "gratuitous," as the White House said the president would take steps to safeguard classified materials during presidential transitions.
The report from Robert Hur, the former Maryland U.S. attorney selected by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Biden, found evidence that Biden willfully held onto and shared with a ghostwriter highly classified information, but laid out 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.
The White House has said Biden erred in having the documents in his home and Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House counsel's office, said Friday that Biden would soon name a task force "to ensure that there are better processes in place" to protect classified materials when administrations change.
While Biden, unlike former President Donald Trump, won't face criminal charges for his handling of the documents, the Hur report nonetheless does cast doubt on Biden's case that he brings normalcy to the presidency after the chaos of Trump's tenure.
Images of federal agents finding a classified Biden memo on Afghanistan from his time as vice president stashed in his Delaware garage work against the Democratic president's argument that he's a more competent chief executive and a more careful steward of the nation's secrets than Trump.
Trump is under criminal indictment for knowingly hanging on to to classified records at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida and resisting turning them over, perhaps the most damning -- and stickiest -- of the four criminal cases against him. Biden, for his part, faces no charges. Weeks after the FBI searched Trump's private residence and turned up classified documents, Biden slammed his predecessor as "totally irresponsible."
The Republican former president, who is on a glide path to his party's nomination this year, has been charged with dozens of felony counts related to his handling of classified materials stored at his Florida estate after leaving the White House. Trump has been crying foul on the campaign trail for much of the last year, noting that Biden had also stored classified materials in his garage.
Thursday's report will have little bearing on Trump's legal case, but it makes his political argument stronger. Trump can now cite Hur's finding that Biden retained and disclosed highly classified materials. And Trump can at least muddy the Democrats' argument that he alone represents a threat to democracy. Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller simply shared a smiley face in one social media post responding to Hur's report.
'MY PROPERTY'
During his interview with special counsel investigators, Biden was emphatic that his notebooks were "my property."
"Every president before me has done the exact same thing," he said.
The statement had echoes of Trump, who has been charged with illegally possessing classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after he left office.
"Under the Presidential Records Act, which is civil not criminal, I had every right to have these documents," Trump has said.
Sounds similar, but there are some differences. Trump was arguing that large swaths of presidential records were his personal property. Biden was making a specific claim about personal writings, for which there is legal precedent.
Investigators said that Biden mentioned that former President Ronald Reagan kept diaries in his home and that contemporaneous evidence from the investigators suggested that Biden believed he could keep the notebooks at home.
Reagan left the White House in 1989 with eight years' worth of handwritten diaries though they contained top secret information, investigators have said. Those documents came up during criminal litigation in the late 1980s and were referred to by the Justice Department as "personal records."
Trump, though, has been accused of purposefully hanging on to boxes of documents even after National Archives requested they be returned, forcing FBI agents to come to his estate to take them. The documents were military secrets and details of the U.S. nuclear capabilities that prosecutors argue he sought to keep as mementos, prosecutors said.
MEMORY FAULTED
The Hur report described the 81-year-old Democrat's memory as "hazy," "fuzzy," "faulty," "poor" and having "significant limitations." It noted that Biden could not recall defining milestones in his own life such as when his son Beau died or when he served as vice president.
Asked whether the White House would release a copy of the transcript of Biden's interview with Hur that could dispute Hur's characterizations, Sams said parts of it were classified, but that if parts of it could be declassified, "we'll take a look at that and make a determination."
Taking a question from a reporter at the conclusion of a gun violence prevention event at the White House, Harris said that as a former prosecutor, she considered Hur's comments "gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate."
She noted that Biden's two-day sit-down with Hur occurred just after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel, where more than 1,200 people were killed and about 250 were taken hostage -- including many Americans.
"It was an intense moment for the commander in chief of the United States of America," Harris said, saying she spent countless hours with Biden and other officials in the days that followed and he was "on top of it all."
She added that "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."
Harris concluded by saying a special counsel should have a "higher level of integrity than what we saw."
Her comments came a day after Biden insisted that his "memory is fine" and grew visibly angry at the White House, as he denied forgetting when his son died. Beau Biden died of brain cancer in 2015 at the age of 46. In his interview with the special counsel's office, Hur also writes that Biden twice appeared confused about when his term as vice president ended.
"And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him," the report said. "Among other things, he mistakenly said he 'had a real difference' of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama."
Sams suggested that the political environment led Hur, who was appointed as U.S. attorney by Trump, to include the comments. "There's an environment that we are in, that generates a ton of pressure, because you have congressional Republicans, other Republicans, attacking prosecutors that they don't like," he said.
The special counsel's report does take aim at Biden's memory and mental capability as it lays out the ways in which the president could mount a hypothetical defense had he been charged with a crime.
It reports: "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 Justice Department is in a precarious position, investigating Biden, his son Hunter and also Trump on separate accusations, all during the 2024 presidential campaign. Trump has repeatedly claimed that federal investigators are out to send him to jail for political revenge. Garland has taken great pains to insulate the department from Trump's attacks and demonstrate prosecutorial independence.
As such, he selected the Trump-appointed Hur. The dings at Biden's memory were also blasted as cheap, false shots by Biden's attorney and White House lawyers, who said the report uses prejudicial words to describe "a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events."
Information for this article was contributed by Aamer Madhani, Steve Peoples and Colleen Long of The Associated Press.
Spokesman for the White House Counsel's Office Ian Sams speaks at a press briefing at the White House in Washington, Friday, Feb. 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)