President Joe Biden will not be criminally charged with stashing classified documents in his garage and private office.
Although the report did not recommend bringing charges against the 81-year-old, it provides a cascade of damaging findings about files found in Biden's garage as well as the president's fitness for office.
In interviews with investigators, Biden became muddled about the dates he was vice president and could not even remember the year in which his son Beau died.
And it said his cavalier attitude to classified documents, such as his habit of reading sensitive files to a ghostwriter, posed a significant national security risk.
One of the reasons they decided not to press charges was because 'at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory'.
His 'diminished faculties in advancing age' would likely make him a sympathetic figure to jurors, the report says.
Biden found himself in the spotlight after his predecessor Donald Trump was charged with illegally keeping classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago home.
Special Counsel Robert Hur spent a year investigating. His report will likely undermine the Biden campaign's attempts to use the charges against Trump in the 2024 election.
Instead there is plentiful ammunition for Trump, with a series of revelations about Biden's mental sharpness.
It describes his failure to remember key dates in his career and his personal life when he was interviewed by investigators.
'He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended ("if it was 2013 - when did I stop being Vice President?"), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began ("in 2009, am I still Vice President?"),' he reportedly said.
'He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.'
He was also apparently hazy on the debate around withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, which was such a key part of the first months of his presidency.
'We also expect many jurors to be struck by the place where the Afghanistan documents were ultimately found in Mr. Biden's Delaware home: in a badly damaged box in the garage, near a collapsed dog crate, a dog bed, a Zappos box, an empty bucket, a broken lamp wrapped with duct tape, potting soil, and synthetic firewood,' the report concludes.
The report details lapses in Biden's memory, both in conversations with his ghostwriter and with investigators. The conclusion is that jurors may have though he made an innocent mistake.
The material included notebooks with handwritten entries 'implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods' taken from White House briefings.
The investigation said there was plenty of evidence to suggest that Biden was aware that he was not allowed to keep such classified notes after leaving office, pointing out that his long Washington career meant he was familiar 'with the measures taken to safeguard classified information and the need for those measures to prevent harm to national security.'
Even so, notebooks crammed with classified information were stored in unlocked drawers at his home.
And it was not simply the case that the notebooks were misplaced and forgotten.
'He consulted the notebooks liberally during hours of discussions with his ghostwriter and viewed them as highly private and valued possessions with which he was unwilling to part,' writes Hur.
The ghostwriter helped him with his 2017 memoir, titled 'Promise Me, Dad.'
Biden said he was pleased that no charges would be brought and declared the matter closed.
'I cooperated completely, threw up no roadblocks, and sought no delays,' he said.
'In fact, I was so determined to give the special counsel what they needed that I went forward with five hours of in-person interviews over two days on October 8th and 9th of last year, even though Israel had just been attacked on October 7th and I was in the middle of handling an international crisis.'
White House spokesman Ian Sams said the report offered a misleading account of the president's memory.
'The inappropriate criticisms of the president's memory are inaccurate, gratuitous, and wrong,' he said. 'We told the Special Counsel this.'
For his part, Trump said the findings showed he had been unfairly targeted for prosecution in a two-tiered system.
'The Biden Documents Case is 100 times different and more severe than mine,' he said in an emailed statement. I did nothing wrong, and I cooperated far more.
'What Biden did is outrageously criminal - He had 50 years of documents, 50 times more than I had, and "WILLFULLY RETAINED" them.'
Hur's investigation was separate from Special Counsel Jack Smith's probe into Trump after he left the White House. Smith alleges Trump illegally retained secret documents at his home and then obstructed efforts to recover them.
Trump denies any wrongdoing.
In Biden's case, officials contacted the National Archives to return documents when they had been found at his former office. The FBI was notified and an investigation opened.
Hur said Biden could not be prosecuted as a sitting president.
'We would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president,' his report said.
Critics of Biden pointed out how the Department of Justice homed in on the idea that jurors would give Biden leeway as a forgetful old man.
'If you're too senile to stand trial, then you're too senile to be president,' said Alex Pfeiffer, of the Trump-supporting political action committee Make America Great Again. 'Joe Biden is unfit to lead this nation.'
Comment: The double-standard here is glaring once again proving the two-tiered justice system - what's OK for Biden is not OK for Trump.
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