During five hours of interviews, President Biden repeatedly told a special counsel that he never intended to keep classified information after leaving the vice presidency, but he was sometimes vague about dates and said he was unfamiliar with the paper trail for some of the sensitive issues. documents he handled.

A transcript of the Biden interviews was made public on Tuesday, just as the special counsel, Robert Hur, went before the House Judiciary Committee to answer questions about his investigation into the Democratic president.

Hur concluded in his report that Biden should not face criminal charges for his mishandling of documents, but also questioned the president’s age and competency. The special stood behind his assessment of the president’s memory as an accurate and fair counsel, in prepared testimony to be delivered to Congress.

In prepared remarks, Hur said: What I wrote is what I believe the evidence shows, and what I expect jurors to perceive and believe. I haven’t cleaned up my explanation. Nor have I unfairly discredited the President.

While Biden teased out some details in his interview, the full transcript could raise questions about Hur’s portrayal of the 81-year-old president with significant limitations on his memory. It paints a more structured picture of his conversations with prosecutors, filling in some of the gaps left by Hur’s account of the exchanges.

At the same time, it is clear that the Republican lawyer never asked Biden about the time of his son’s death, which contradicts the president’s outraged public objections to that supposed method of questioning.

Both the hearing and the transcript were intended to clear up lingering questions about Hur’s report on the discovery of some classified documents in Biden’s home and former private office in Washington. But there was no guarantee they would change preconceptions about the president or the Trump appointee who investigated him, especially in a closely fought election year.

On Capitol Hill, Hur would be the rare witness likely to be vilified everywhere by Republicans angry about his decision not to indict the president and by Democrats for his unflattering comments about Biden.

Democrats will try to portray Hur as a political partisan who wants to help his party win the presidential election. Republicans immediately began to dig further into Hur’s assessment of the president’s age and recalled a major line of attack in their effort to unseat Biden.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said at the start of the hearing that it comes down to a few key facts. Joe Biden kept classified information. Joe Biden failed to properly secure classified information and Joe Biden shared classified information with people who did not allow him to do so. Joe Biden broke the law because he is a forgetful old man who appears sympathetic to a jury. Mr Hur has chosen not to press charges.

The Hurs report cited evidence that Biden deliberately retained highly classified information and shared it with a ghostwriter, based on audio of the conversations between the two men in which Biden said he had just come across some classified documents at his home.

In the interviews, Biden said he did not remember the exchange or whether he had actually discovered any documents. He said that if he had discussed anything questionable with the ghostwriter, it was by referring to a 20-page sensitive memo he wrote to then-President Obama in 2009 in which he argued against increasing troop levels in Afghanistan that he wanted to ensure that it would not survive. publication.

Hur devoted much of his report to explaining why he did not believe the evidence against Biden met the standard for criminal prosecution, based in part on the president’s hours of interviews.

In his prepared remarks, Hur said he was aware of the need to explain in detail why he decided not to indict the president. Such statements are common, but are usually treated confidentially; and so he did not hold back, especially in this case.

The need to show my work was particularly strong here, he said. The Attorney General had appointed me to investigate the actions of the Attorney General’s boss, the sitting President of the United States. I knew that for my decision to be credible, I could not simply announce that I would not recommend criminal charges and leave it at that. I had to explain why.

Hur cautioned that he would not discuss any investigative steps or deviate from the report’s contents. He said the evidence and the president himself put his memory squarely at risk.

In the report, Hur said it could be difficult to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Biden intended to keep the documents, which is the standard for conviction in a criminal case. In part, he argued, jurors could be convinced that Biden’s age made him appear forgetful, and there was the potential for innocent explanations for the mishandling of documents.

Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a likable, well-meaning older man with a poor memory, Hur wrote in his report.

In his interviews, Biden repeatedly told prosecutors that he did not know how classified documents ended up in his home and in the former Penn Biden Center office in Washington.

“I have no idea,” he said.

He also insisted he knew they were there and would have returned them to the government.

The president did acknowledge that he deliberately kept his personal diaries, which officials said contained classified information. Biden insisted that they were his own property, a claim also made by previous presidents and vice presidents, and that he had the right to keep them.

He also acknowledged that he was never very organized as prosecutors pressed him on why some documents were in different places.

Hur explained in his report how his findings on Biden were very different from those of special counsel Jack Smith on Republican front-runner Donald Trump, who has been accused of willingly withholding classified documents.

FBI agents searched Trump’s Florida estate in 2022 and removed boxes of documents marked as classified after he rejected multiple requests from the National Archives to return them.

Biden, by his own admission, has kept such an extensive range of photos, documents and artifacts from his more than fifty years in public life that he cannot keep track of everything.

When asked if First Lady Jill Biden kept her things with her, he said, “She doesn’t want anything to do with my filing system.

Biden first spoke to Hur at a time of crisis, a day after Hamas’ devastating attack on Israel in October. 7.

He began the first day of the interview having just gotten off the phone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, part of a series of calls aimed at preventing the attack from turning into a broader regional confrontation. At several points, when Hur suggested a pause, Biden encouraged prosecutors to continue, saying: I’ll pull an all-nighter if we can get this done.

Biden said he left it to his staff to secure classified information presented to him, often leaving stacks of papers on his desk so he could search and secure them.

I never asked anyone, Biden said. He noted that much of his staff had worked with him for years, to the point where they no longer needed direction from him. ‘It’s just finished. Don’t know. I can’t remember who.

The confusion over the timing of the death of Biden’s adult son Beau, who died on May 30, 2015, was highlighted by Hur in his report as an example of the president’s memory loss. But the transcript shows that Hur never asked Biden specifically about his son, as a visibly angry Biden had suggested in comments to reporters on the day the report was released.

How on earth does he dare bring that up, Biden said of Hur. “Honestly, when I was asked the question, I thought to myself it wasn’t their business.

But the transcript suggests that the exchange was less revealing about Biden’s memory than Hur let on, and that Biden’s recollection of it during his emotional remarks at the White House was incorrect.

Hur asked Biden where he kept the things he was “actively working on” while living in a rental house in Virginia immediately after leaving the vice presidency in January 2017. And in that context, it was Biden himself who raised the issue of Beau. illness and death while talking about a book he published later in 2017 about that painful time.

In what month did Beau die? Biden mused, adding: Oh God, May 30th.

A White House lawyer subsequently agreed to the year 2015.

What did he die of in 2015? Biden asked again.

Biden then detailed the story in his book Promise Me, Dad about how his late son encouraged him to stay involved in public life after the Obama administration ended.

The Justice Department has redacted information about other people involved in the case, and the National Security Council and the State Department have blacked out some details related to sensitive intelligence and foreign affairs. Before editing, the transcript was classified as top secret and barred from distribution to foreigners.

Miller, Long and Amiri write for the Associated Press. reported from Washington. AP writers Eric Tucker in Washington and Alanna Durkin Richer in Boston contributed to this report.