Closing summary
Hello again, live blog readers, it’s been a very lively day in US political news. We’re closing this blog now but you can keep up with all our articles on the rest of the website, about today’s Supreme Court hearing, a legislative vote in the Senate and the report into Joe Biden holding onto classified documents after his vice-presidency – and tonight’s Republican caucuses in Nevada and an airing of Tucker Carlson interviewing Vladimir Putin. The live blog will be back on Friday morning.
Here’s where things stand:
Richard Sauber, special counsel to Joe Biden, has released a statement that the office is “pleased” the special counsel found “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter” relating to the retention and disclosure of classified material post-vice presidency. He also suggested that the Biden administration will be taking “substantive action” to prevent such mistakes in the future.
Donald Trump claims Biden’s documents case is worse than his own classified document case, in which he has been criminally charged, after allegedly keeping and hiding top secret papers post-White House. Trump accused the US of having a “two-tiered system of justice” and said Biden’s case was “100 times different and more severe than mine”.
Attorneys for Joe Biden objected to special counsel Robert Hur repeatedly mentioning the president’s memory problems in his report, saying his descriptions were neither accurate nor appropriate.
Joe Biden says he ‘cooperated completely’ with the classified document investigation, even engaging in a lengthy interview with the special council not long after Hamas had attacked southern Israel and created an international crisis.
Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report says Biden “willfully” kept and disclosed classified documents but a jury would be unlikely to convict beyond reasonable doubt, thinking it more likely to have been an innocent mistake by a well-meaning forgetful old man.
The classified documents report said no criminal charges were warranted against Joe Biden, who can’t be charged as a sitting president, and would not be justified even if he wasn’t president.
The US Senate voted to advance legislation that will send assistance to the militaries of Israel and Ukraine, as well as provide aid to Taiwan, but without new US immigration measures aimed chiefly at dealing with migration at the US-Mexico border. The legislation cleared the 60-vote threshold necessary to get around a filibuster, with 67 votes in favor, and 32 opposed. Democrats are aiming for a full vote next week.
The US Supreme Court appeared broadly skeptical of Colorado’s effort to keep Donald Trump off this year’s presidential ballot, with chief justice John Roberts worrying that if followed, other states would retaliate against future Democratic or Republican candidates, potentially swaying elections.
The supreme court gathered to hear arguments in a case that could decide if Donald Trump is eligible to continue his run for reelection as president. A legal effort to keep him off ballots nationwide began last year, when advocacy groups filed lawsuits in various states, arguing the constitution bars Trump from serving because he engaged in an insurrection on January 6, 2021.
More from the statement of Bob Bauer, the personal counsel to president Biden, on the Hur report:
Very little in this opus adds to a clear, succinctly stated understanding of a straightforward conclusion: no misconduct occurred, no charges are warranted. The Report delves into a discussion of the “evidence” of “willful” retention of classified documents, only to acknowledge that there is, in fact, no case of “willful” retention at all. Pages are devoted to documents related to Afghanistan policy that the Special Counsel concedes have little or no national security sensitivity. After extensive discussion of the President’s use of his diaries in writing his book, Promise Me, Dad, the Special Counsel Report concludes that the President shared with an assistant two passages from his diaries deemed to contain classified material, while also conceding that the President communicated a concern with protecting classified information throughout the book-writing process – and that the passages in question never made it into the book.
He cited a statement from the Department of Justice inspector general, who noted that although high-profile investigations – like those of a president – may be subject to more intense scrutiny, in this case the investigation violated “well-established department norms” – including “trashing the subject of an investigation with extraneous, unfounded, and irrelevant critical commentary”. More from his statement:
Throughout this process, a guiding principle has been to protect the integrity and independence of this investigation. Based on the facts and the law, the Special Counsel in this case had no choice but to find that criminal charges were not warranted. He had other choices, which should have been guided by the Department’s rules, policies, and practices, and he made the wrong ones.
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