According to media reports, US President Joe Biden does not have to expect charges in the affair surrounding his previous handling of confidential government documents. The Washington Post and other US media reported on Tuesday that the final report by special investigator Robert Hur, appointed by the Justice Department, would be published in the coming days.
The report is likely to criticize Biden and his employees’ handling of secret documents from Biden’s time as Vice President under President Barack Obama (2009 to 2017). However, this should not have any criminal consequences.
Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump was indicted by the federal judiciary last year because he took numerous secret documents from the White House to his private estate Mar-a-Lago in the state of Florida at the end of his term in office at the beginning of 2021 and then hid them from the reach of the judiciary . The case became public in August 2022 through a high-profile search of Mar-a-Lago by the FBI.
At the end of 2022, around a dozen confidential government documents from his time as vice president were found in an office formerly used by Biden. Further secret documents were subsequently discovered in Biden’s garage and in his home in the state of Delaware.
Attorney General Merrick Garland then appointed former federal prosecutor Robert Hur as special prosecutor in the Biden case. Hur was once appointed federal prosecutor by Trump.
There are certain parallels between the Trump and Biden document scandals – but there are also big differences. According to the Washington Post, Biden has fewer than 20 documents, while Trump has around 300.
In addition, the incumbent president cooperated with the authorities from the start. Trump, on the other hand, refused to return the documents to Mar-a-Lago – and, according to the indictment, is said to have gone to great lengths to hide the documents from the judiciary.
The indictment against Trump in the documents affair is one of four indictments against the ex-president, who wants to win back the White House in the presidential election in November. The Republican has described the investigations against him as politically motivated.
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