Catsnmeters
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- Sep 19, 2022
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Yes he did. Starts when n page 242.
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"Finally, the two main sets of evidence summarized above, suggesting Mr. Biden knew he was not allowed to keep classified notebooks, do not suffice to prove his willfulness beyond a reasonable doubt. The first set of evidence is that . Biden, at his staffs insistence. stored his classified notecards in a SCIF at the Archives, and several months earlier in the fall of 2016 he told Zwonitzer "they didn't even know I have this [notebook]."931 This could suggest that Mr. Biden concealed his notebooks from staff to avoid restrictions on his access to or use of them. But the defense will argue that this treatment of the notecards and notebooks 1s also consistent with an innocent explanation: Mr. Biden may have simply acquiesced to his staffs decision to store his notecards in the Archives SCIF, even though, as he suggested to his ghostwriter onApril 26, 2017, he (like Mr. Reagan and the Department ofJustice before him) did not think he was required to do so. If that is what happened, Mr. Eiden was not required to inform his staff that their (in his view) unnecessary advice could also apply to his notebooks. His failure to flag the notebooks for what he believed to be his staffs overly cautious treatment is not compelling evidence of willfulness. In the same vein, Mr. Eiden could have concluded that the forms he signed about safeguarding classified information in the Archives SCIF were boilerplate paperwork that applied in most cases, but not to the handwritten materials ofa former president or vice president, which historically have been treated as the former officeholder's personal property. And he could point to McGrail's current understanding that the notecards were stored in a SCIF simply to keep them secure, not because they were classified.932 The second set of evidence concerns the guidance on "best practices" that Counsel Cynthia Hogan gave Mr. Eiden in 2010 and 2011 about handling classified information, and his decision after receiving this guidance to store the notebooks in a safe in the White House.933 This evidence, too, is consistent with innocence. By the time Mr. Eiden left the White House in 2017, Hogan's guidance about storage in a safe was six years old, and Mr. Eiden had long since stopped following it. The evidence suggests that he did not store his notebooks in a safe for the last several years of his administration, and no one in the White House raised concern While Mr. Biden may have recalled Hogan's advice and concluded that it meant he should not bring the notebooks home with him when he left the White House, there is no evidence he did so recall. And there would have been good reason for him not to think this way, especially since Hogan gave her 2010 advice seven years earlier during a meeting scheduled to last ten minutes, and Mr. Biden had long since stopped following her advice, which Hogan told us would have reflected best practices rather than legal requirements_9:l5 For these reasons, we do not believe the government could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. B1den knew it was unlawful to retain his notebooks at his home after the vice president."
