& now for truthful context:
Nevertheless, we do not believe this evidence is sufficient, as jurors would likely find reasonable doubt for one or more of several reasons. Both when he served as vice president and when the Afghanistan documents were found in Mr. Biden's Delaware garage in 2022, his possession of them in his Delaware home was not a basis for prosecution because as vice president and president, he had authority to keep classified documents in his home.
The best case for charges would rely on Mr. Biden's possession of the Afghanistan documents in his Virginia home in February 2017. when he was a private citizen and when he told his ghostwriter he had just found classified materiaL Several defenses are likely to create reasonable doubt as to such charges. For example, Mr. Biden could have found the classified Afghanistan documents at his Virginia home in 2017 and then forgotten about them soon after. This could convince some reasonable jurors that he did not retain them willfully. \Vhen Mr. Biden told his ghostwriter about finding ''all the classified stuff downstairs," his tone was matter-of-fact. For a person who had viewed classified documents nearly every day 4 for eight years as vice president, including regularly in his home, finding classified documents at home less than a month after leaving office could have been an unremarkable and forgettable event.
Notably, the classified Afghanistan documents did not come up again in Mr. Biden's dozens of hours of recorded conversations with the ghostwriter, or in his book. And the place where the Afghanistan documents were eventually found in Mr. Biden's Delaware garage-in a badly damaged box surrounded by household detritus-suggests the documents might have been forgotten.
Given Mr. Biden's limited precision and recall during his interviews with his ghostwriter and with our office, jurors may hesitate to place too much evidentiary weight on a single eight-word utterance to his ghostwriter about finding classified documents in Virginia, in the absence of other, more direct evidence. We searched for such additional evidence and found it wanting. In particular, no witness, photo, email, text message, or any other evidence conclusively places the Afghanistan documents at the Virginia home in 2017.
pp 4-6
https://www.justice.gov/storage/report-from-special-counsel-robert-k-hur-february-2024.pdf