URGENT: The report from prosecutors on Joe Biden's handling of classified documents might be WORSE for him than an actual indictment

The massive report, released today, doesn't come close to exonerating Biden's conduct. It just suggests he's too senile to face criminal charges. How can he possibly remain President through 2029?

Be careful what you wish for.

A federal investigation into classified documents found in President Biden’s home ended Thursday as a special prosecutor declined to charge Biden with mishandling protected information. “No criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” the 345th and final page of the report explains.

But the first 344 pages of the report from special counsel Robert K. Hur told an uglier story, one that is likely to haunt Biden through Election Day.

The report argues he should not be charged in part because he would likely present himself to a jury as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” making convicting him difficult.

Worse, it says the prosecutors themselves saw him that way when they interviewed him in October. On two separate occasions, Biden did not seem to know when he had served as vice-president, they wrote. He also could not remember when his son Beau had died.

A sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man. Hard to imagine a description further from “presidential” than that one.

The report is so damaging to Biden that he was forced Thursday night to take a step he generally avoids - answering questions at a hastily scheduled press conference. “My memory is fine,” Biden told reporters. “I know what the hell I’m doing.”

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(Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., 46th president of the United States.)

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The devastating portrait of Biden’s failing memory comes in a week when he has not once but twice spoken of conversations with now-dead European leaders.

Yet Hur’s merciless takedown of Biden doesn’t end there. In fact, the most substantive findings from Hur’s year-long investigation have so far gone mostly unnoticed, because the memory issues it raises are so overwhelming politically.

(To find out why, subscribe. Or wait a week. You’re gonna want to find out now, I promise…)

When the Justice Department appointed Hur in January 2023, Biden’s chorus of media defenders downplayed the seriousness of his inquiry.

Over and over, they argued that it was nothing like Jack Smith’s investigation into Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents.

Yet the New York Times - while claiming the “Biden and Trump cases are markedly different” - warned that “special prosecutor investigations have a way of distracting and even crippling a White House.” (Article, paywalled.)

In this case, the Times proved prescient.

Hur’s investigation proved far worse for Biden than anyone anticipated - and may be the final nail in Smith’s increasingly troubled effort to convict Trump over the papers Trump took to Florida in 2021.

After the Federal Bureau of Investigation seized classified documents from Mar-a-Lago in 2022, Biden called Trump “totally irresponsible” for the way Trump had handled them.

“What data was in there that may compromise sources and methods?” Biden told 60 Minutes. He added that he didn’t know “how anyone can be that irresponsible.”

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Yet even as Hur declined to file charges, he made clear in the report that Biden had treated classified documents sloppily for many years, in ways that bothered his staff members.

Notably, during a trip to Hamptons in August 2010, Biden apparentlylost a briefing book that contained Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information - the most highly classified material the United States government possesses:

Mr. Biden failed to return Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information (also referred to as “codeword”) contents of a classified briefing book that he had received during a trip to the Hamptons, in New York. We were unable to determine whether these materials were ever recovered.

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(Hey, Mike Bloomberg! You seen that gosh-darn briefing book anywhere? It’s got all kinds of cool stuff in it!)

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That incident, and Biden’s general unwillingness to return intelligence briefing books quickly, led Cynthia Hogan, his general counsel at the time, to brief him on the right way to handle classified material on Aug. 17, 2010.

Yet Biden’s sloppiness continued, according to the report.

“Mr. Biden continued frequently to leave classified documents unattended,” prosecutors wrote.

Biden was not merely sloppy.

In 2016, near the end of his second term as Barack Obama’s vice-president, he appeared to looked for loopholes to hold on to classified material. In Biden’s case, the classified information mostly took the form of personal notebooks, as well as cards he carried in his jacket pockets, on which he jotted notes.

Biden’s attitude toward the cards so upset a woman who was working on his executive secretary’s team that she complained “the notes contained classified material commingled with Mr. Biden's personal notes.”

But the executive secretary, Kristen Bakotic, disagreed, leading her employee to email “for the record” her belief that the notes were “being mishandled.”

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(For the Record, I don’t like what you’re doing with those records.)

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(For those of you who waited a week to read this… you don’t have to do that again!)

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Under pressure from John McGrail, who was his general counsel at the end of the Obama Adminstration, Biden relented on the notecards, which he sent to the National Archives.

But he held on to his notebooks, which he told the special counsel were “my property.”

As the report explains, Biden:

treated the notebooks markedly differently from the rest of his notes and other presidential records throughout his vice presidency, for example, allowing staff to store and review his notecards, but not his notebooks.

Biden viewed the notebooks effectively as diaries, and he did not want to return them, even if they contained some classified material, according to the report.

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Essentially, then, the report presents a picture of a very high-ranking politician who believed the rules about classified material applied to him.

Except when they didn’t.

Which is more or less what Donald Trump thought, too.

And so today’s report makes the Trump indictment in Florida look like a textbook case of selective prosecution. At this point, the White House may be regretting it ever heard of Jack Smith.

Be careful what you wish for.