President Biden’s $8 million book deal was a likely motive behind his decision to take notebooks containing classified information when he left the White House in 2017, special counsel Robert K. Hur said.
Mr. Hur, testifying Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee about his investigation into Mr. Biden’s possession of classified documents, described audio recordings from 2017 in which Mr. Biden admitted having classified material.
The former vice president read some of the material to his ghostwriter, who was helping him author his second memoir and did not have a security clearance, Mr. Hur said.
“I just found all the classified documents downstairs,” the president said on the audio recordings, according to Mr. Hur.
Mr. Hur testified for more than four hours, affirming the conclusion of his February report that Mr. Biden “had strong motivations to ignore proper procedures for safeguarding his classified notebooks” because he sought to secure a book deal, signed with Macmillan publishers, that would ultimately pay him $8 million.
“Joe Biden had 8 million reasons to break the rules, took classified information and shared it with the guy who was writing the book,” said Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican. “That’s why he knew the rules but he broke them. For an $8 million book advance.”
SEE ALSO: Robert Hur: Biden told ghostwriter he had classified documents, read them out loud
Mr. Hur, who left the Justice Department on Monday, said his investigators “did identify evidence” supporting their assessment of Mr. Biden’s motives for holding on to classified documents.
In addition to the book deal, Mr. Biden “likely viewed the notebooks, like the marked classified documents related to Afghanistan recovered from his garage, as an irreplaceable contemporaneous record of some of the most important moments of his vice presidency,” Mr. Hur said in the report.
“This record was valuable to him for many reasons including to help defend his record and buttress his legacy as a world leader,” Mr. Hur wrote.
Republicans questioned Mr. Hur’s decision not to charge Mr. Biden with mishandling classified documents.
In his report, Mr. Hur said jurors would view the president as “an elderly man with a poor memory.”
Mr. Hur told lawmakers that, even though Mr. Biden acknowledged possessing classified documents in the 2017 audio recording, Mr. Biden’s defense could argue that he forgot about them.
SEE ALSO: ‘Was I still VP?’ Biden’s memory failed him in interviews over classified documents
“And therefore, it would be difficult to convince a jury that, actually, he willfully knew that it was illegal to keep the documents and continue to do so,” Mr. Hur said.
Democrats hoped to force Mr. Hur to go on record publicly absolving Mr. Biden of any wrongdoing.
Instead, Mr. Hur stood by his conclusions in the report.
“I did not exonerate him, and that word did not appear in my report,” Mr. Hur said in response to a question from Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Washington Democrat.
Later, White House spokesperson Ian Sams told reporters that the Hur report provided no evidence of wrongdoing.
“The conclusion was there is simply no case here. Case Closed. It’s time to move on,” he said.
Mr. Biden concluded his term as vice president in 2017 with plans to publish his second book, “Promise Me, Dad.”
As vice president, he met with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer, who helped Mr. Biden author his first memoir in 2007, “Promises to Keep.”
Mr. Hur surmised in his report that Mr. Biden needed his notebooks for the book project. The notebooks contained classified information and Mr. Biden knew that, Mr. Hur said, but he took them out of the White House nonetheless and provided the material to Mr. Zwonitzer, who did not have a security clearance.
Mr. Hur and his investigators interviewed about 150 people, including many members of Mr. Biden’s staff who handled the material. They questioned Mr. Biden on Oct. 8 and Oct. 9 about the classified documents stored at his Delaware home and in his office at his Washington think tank. Some of the material was found in a damaged box in his garage. The stash of material dated as far back as the 1980s, during his time in the U.S. Senate, which means he had to have taken the documents from a secure room in the Capitol.
Throughout the interview, Mr. Biden frequently told Mr. Hur and his investigators that he could not recall whether he had the documents, why he had them or how they ended up at his home in Delaware and his office in Washington, according to a transcript reviewed by The Washington Times.
He told Mr. Hur he could not remember how he ended up with classified material about the Obama administration’s 2009 Afghanistan troop surge that investigators found in his possession.
When Mr. Hur’s staff questioned Mr. Biden about a notebook with classified information regarding Afghanistan, he wasn’t sure whether he wrote in it as vice president.
The date on the notebook was April 20, 2009, about four months after he and President Obama took office.
“Was I still vice president?” Mr. Biden asked in the interview. “I was, wasn’t I? Yeah.”
The interview is peppered with answers of “I don’t recall” or “I don’t remember” from Mr. Biden about why or how he took classified information or how he still had it.
The memory lapses were so frequent that they became a central argument in Mr. Hur’s decision not to charge the president, even though he determined that Mr. Biden’s mishandling of the documents “present serious risks to national security.”
The hearing fueled arguments that Mr. Biden’s political opponent, former President Donald Trump, is the victim of a two-tiered system of justice with his prosecution for mishandling classified documents. The former president, who is poised to be the Republican nominee in November, is charged by special counsel Jack Smith with 40 criminal counts for taking classified documents from the White House and storing them at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, Florida Republican, questioned why Mr. Hur did not charge Mr. Zwonitzer.
The author, who, upon learning of Mr. Hur’s appointment to investigate the classified documents, deliberately deleted audio recordings he made with Mr. Biden for the book.
Mr. Hur explained that he spared Mr. Zwonitzer because the author had retained the transcripts of the audio recordings that included incriminating evidence.
“Zwonitzer should have been charged. Wasn’t. Biden and Trump should have been treated equally. They weren’t.” Mr. Gaetz said. “And that is the double standard that I think a lot of Americans are concerned about.”
• Susan Ferrechio can be reached at sferrechio@washingtontimes.com.
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