News - Middle East: A special council probing President Joe Biden for keeping classified materials says it is not bringing criminal charges against him because he could portray himself before the jury as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”

Special counsel Robert Hur on Thursday published a 345-page report which stated that Biden, 81, knowingly “retained and disclosed" documents with classified information at his home, and struggled to recall key dates in his life.
In his defense statement of dropping the charges against Biden, Hur argued it would be difficult to "convince a jury that they should convict him - by then a former president well into his 80s of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness".
"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," wrote Hur.
The report is an outcome of a 15-month-long investigation consisting of 173 interviews with 147 witnesses, including over five hours of interviews with the president.
When Biden was being interviewed, Hur’s prosecution team observed that his memory was "severely limited".
The special counsel of the Justice Department stated that he could not recall when he was vice president (2009-2017), or "even within several years, when his son Beau died" (2015).
The top secret files were found at Biden's house in Wilmington, Delaware, and former private office from 2022 to 2023.
The findings come after another investigation accused former president Donald Trump of mishandling classified documents after the end of his tenure, the trial of which is due in May.