White House spokesman and Senior Advisor to the White House Counsel’s Office Ian Sams has written to the White House Correspondents’ Association complaining about media coverage of a Justice Department report addressing Joe Biden’s willful retention of classified documents and failing memory.
Sams complained coverage of special counsel Robert Hur’s “false and inappropriate comments” about Biden had “distracted” from the fact he concluded the President should not be charged.
Hur said in the report that the 81-year-old Democrat should not go before a jury partly because jurors would see him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” He also noted Biden had been unable to remember when he was Vice President or when his son Beau died “within several years” during investigatory interviews.
The Special Counsel report was ~400 pages long, meandering and confusing. That led to a lot of misreporting on its conclusions, namely that it found POTUS “willfully retained” classified docs.
That’s wrong.
I sent a letter last night to the WH press corps explaining the facts: pic.twitter.com/Dd4pI9abg6
— Ian Sams (@IanSams46) February 14, 2024
Singling out CNN, CBS, the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, Sams also complained the media should not have reported that Hur found Biden had “wilfully” retained classified documents.
The report does clearly state that investigators “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” including “marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan” and notebooks containing “entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods.”
