A closer look at the Biden special counsel report: Do the headlines match the evidence?

When special counsel Robert Hur's report on his yearlong investigation into President Joe Biden's handling of classified materials was made public last week, it said no charges were warranted because the evidence wasn't sufficient to support a conviction.

That might have been the end of it as a legal matter but two sentences near the top of his executive summary, the 14-page recap of the massive 388-page document, created an enduring political firestorm.

Seized on by the news media in the immediate scramble to report the news — and by Republicans eager to capitalize — was the sentence: «Our investigation uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.»

And then came Hur's politically damaging suggestion that, in deciding whether to prosecute, he had considered that Biden would likely present himself to a jury as a «sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.»

A closer look at the rest of the report, though, shows despite Hur's «willfully retained and disclosed» assertion there were other innocent explanations that couldn't be ruled out, and language about Biden's apparent memory lapses didn't contain much context, leading to questions about their relevance.

Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2020, told ABC News Hur's executive summary stands «in tension» with the rest of the report.

«There's a leap in the executive summary from the evidence, and those kinds of leaps and editorializing are contrary to the most fundamental principles of how prosecutors are supposed to operate when addressing uncharged conduct,» Eisen