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President Joe Biden will soon appoint a high-level task force to recommend actions that will prevent classified material from being mishandled or inadvertently lost during future presidential transitions, White House spokesman Ian Sams said Friday.
Mr. Sams, who serves as a spokesman for the White House counsel's office, was addressing reporters at the daily White House briefing after the release of a report from special counsel Robert Hoare in which Mr. Hoare, a Republican who served in the Trump administration, attacked Biden's memory while refusing to accuse him of any resulting crime. About the discovery of classified materials in his home in Wilmington, Delaware.
He told reporters that the National Archives found that improper storage of classified materials during transitions was a common occurrence that Biden believes should be fixed.
“What we will do is the president will appoint a task force to review how the transition processes look at classified materials to ensure that there are better processes in place so that when … staff around the building are virtually packing boxes to deliver them,” he said, “try to get out during the transition period … and at the same time … They are still ruling and managing the affairs of the state.”
He added that the task force would “try to make recommendations” to prevent such things from happening, and said it would be led by a “senior government leader.”
Mr. Hoare's report said that Biden, in his estimation, “intentionally” kept secret notebooks containing handwritten notes he had taken during his time as vice president, but did not recommend that Biden face criminal charges, citing what it described as “mitigating factors.” A mission that led him to state that the charges were unjustified and would not have been justified even if Biden were not president and barred from prosecution under Justice Department policy.
The Republican prosecutor also noted that Biden's memory of the documents was “significantly limited” during his interviews with investigators, and justified his decision by saying that there was not enough evidence to convince the jury that Biden intentionally kept the documents for longer than necessary. Reasonable doubt, in part because the president has cooperated extensively with the investigation.
“His cooperation with our investigation, including informing the government that the Afghanistan documents were in his garage in Delaware, is likely to convince some jurors that he made an innocent mistake, rather than acting intentionally — that is, with the intent to violate the law.” As required by law.”
But even as he declined to prosecute the president and said there was insufficient evidence to justify charges or convince a jury of his guilt, the Republican attorney general took a rhetorical swipe at the 81-year-old president, calling him out in a passage in his book. Report as a person who might appear to the jury as a “well-meaning elderly man with a weak memory.”
Sams attributed Hoare's decision to include disparaging remarks about Biden's mental acuity to a “very pressurized political environment” in which prosecutors who choose not to charge Democrats fear criticism from GOP leaders who claim there is a “two-tiered justice system.” ” in the United States.
“There's pressure to criticize and make, you know, statements that you might not have made otherwise,” he said.
