Speaking from the White House Thursday night President Joe Biden indignantly defended willfully withholding classified information and storing broken boxes in his unsecured garage and in a downtown Washington D.C. office.
Indignant Biden Triples Down in Wake of Scathing Special Counsel Report
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) February 9, 2024
https://t.co/N6qFFIq31U
Biden was not charged by Special Counsel Robert Hur because "considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during out interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."
BREAKING: The Report on Biden's Mishandling of Classified Information Has Landed
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) February 8, 2024
https://t.co/pu9xXerO7g
But among the troves of documents Biden improperly kept and mishandled after his time in the U.S. Senate and vice presidency was classified information about the war in Afghanistan. The documents were clearly marked classified and Biden shared them with his memoir ghostwriter, who also did not have authority to review them. From the report:
Marked classified documents about Afghanistan. These documents from fall 2009 have classification markings up to the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level. They were found in a box in Mr. Biden's Delaware garage that contained other materials of great personal significance to him and that he appears to have personally used and accessed. The marked classified documents were found along with drafts of the handwritten 2009 Thanksgiving memo Mr. Biden sent President Obama in a last-ditch effort to persuade him not to send additional troops to Afghanistan. These materials were proof of the stand Mr. Biden took in what he regarded as among the most important decisions of his vice presidency.
Mr. Biden wrote his 2007 and 2017 memoirs with the help of a ghostwriter. In a recorded conversation with his ghostwriter in February 2017, about a month after he left office, Mr. Biden said, while referencing his 2009 Thanksgiving memo, that he had "just found all the classified stuff downstairs." At the time, he was renting a home in Virginia, where he met his ghostwriter to work on his second memoir. Downstairs from where they met was Mr. Biden's office, where he stored his papers. He moved out of the Virginia home in 2019, consolidating his belongings in Delaware-where FBI agents later found marked classified documents about the Afghanistan troop surge in his garage.
In August 2021, Biden ordered the chaotic and catastrophic departure from Afghanistan. Thirteen U.S. service members were killed in a suicide attack at the airport and hundreds of Americans were left behind enemy lines. Billions of dollars in military equipment was abandoned and taken over by the Taliban.
The White House, which braced for impact and had expectations the report would be at a minimum embarrassing to Biden, is trying to make the argument that the case is closed.
