Justice Department will not charge Biden in classified documents probe

President Biden willfully held onto and disclosed classified materials after leaving the Obama administration and becoming a private citizen, but his actions do no warrant criminal charges, according to a Justice Department special counsel report report released Thursday.

The nearly 350-page report from special counsel Robert Hur says the evidence did not establish Biden's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

"We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter," the report says. "We would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president."

White the White House agreed with the decision that chargers were not warranted, a letter, lawyers for the president said "we disagree with a number of inaccurate and inappropriate comments in the Special Counsel's report" on the classified documents, including what it called "highly prejudicial language" to describe the president's memory.

White House lawyer Richard Sauber said the report shows that Biden cooperated with the investigation and said "mistakes when packing documents ... are unfortunately a common occurrence."

He said that Biden would take "new, substantive action to help prevent such mistakes in the future" but did not say what that action would be.

What the classified materials were

Hur's decision not to pursue charges against the president brings an end to a lengthy investigation that began after Biden's lawyers found classified documents in November 2022 in the offices of the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.

Biden's personal attorneys turned over those materials, which were said to date to his time as vice president, to the National Archives and Records Administration.