The purpose of this post is to answer one narrow, simple question: Did the report of the Special Counsel's Office state that President Biden shared classified information with his ghostwriter? President Biden stated last night, the same day that the report was released, that it did not. To answer this question I read the pertinent parts of the original documents. From the official Remarks of President Biden last night:
Q Mr. President, why did you share classified information with your ghostwriter?
THE PRESIDENT: I did not share classified information. I did not share it.
Q With your ghostwriter?
THE PRESIDENT: With my ghostwriter, I did not. Guarantee you, I did not. What the —
Q But the special counsel said that —
THE PRESIDENT: Well, no, they did not say that.
Q Okay.
THE PRESIDENT: He did not say that.
Q But, Mr. President —
THE
PRESIDENT: No, let — let me answer your question. The fact of the
matter is what I didn’t want repeated — I didn’t want him to know, and I didn’t read it to him — was I had written a long memorandum to President Obama why we should not be in this — in Afghanistan. And I was of the — multiple pages.
And so, what I was referring to — I
said “classified” [on tape] — I should have said it was — should be private
because it was a contact between a president and a vice president as to what was going on. That’s what he was referring to. It was not classified information in that document. That was not classified.
I then searched the Special Counsel's report for any mention of the term "ghostwriter":
To our knowledge, no one has identified any classified information published in Promise Me, Dad, but Mr. Biden shared information, including some classified information, from those notebooks with his ghostwriter. ...(p3)
And while reading his notebook entries aloud during meetings with his ghostwriter, Mr. Biden sometimes skipped over presumptively classified material and warned his ghostwriter the entries might be classified, but at least three times Mr. Biden read from classified entries aloud to his ghostwriter
nearly verbatim. (p7)
We also considered whether Mr. Biden willfully disclosed national defense information to his ghostwriter by reading aloud certain classified notebook passages to the ghostwriter nearly verbatim on at least three occasions. Mr. Biden should have (9) known that by reading his unfiltered notes about classified meetings in the Situation Room, he risked sharing classified information with his ghostwriter. But the evidence does not show that when Mr. Biden shared the specific passages with his ghostwriter, Mr. Biden knew the passages were classified and intended to share classified information. Mr. Biden's lapses in attention and vigilance demonstrate why former officials should not keep classified materials unsecured at home and read them aloud to others, but jurors could well conclude that Mr. Biden's actions were unintentional. We therefore decline to charge Mr. Biden for disclosure of these passages to his ghostwriter. (10)
The practices of retaining classified material unsecured locations and reading classified material to one's ghostwriter present serious risks to national (11) security...(12)
D. Mr. Biden disclosed classified information in his notebooks to Zwonitzer (p 103, emphasis in original)
There is evidence that, after his vice presidency, Mr. Biden willfully retained marked classified documents about Afghanistan and unmarked classified handwritten notes in his notebooks...He had no legal authority to do so, and his retention of these materials, and disclosure of classified information from his notebooks to his ghostwriter, risked serious damage to America's national security. (200)
There is also evidence that Mr. Biden willfully disclosed classified information in his notebooks to his ghostwriter by reading it aloud to him. We conclude that this evidence does not establish Mr. Biden's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. We therefore decline prosecution of Mr. Biden based on his retention of his notebooks and disclosure of information in them. (223)
C. The evidence does not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Biden willfully disclosed national defense information in the notebooks to his ghostwriter
... we do not believe the evidence supports charges of willful disclosure beyond a reasonable doubt. (244, bolded original, underlined added)
...he did share classified information with Zwonitzer by reading from classified notebook entries to Zwonitzer nearly verbatim. (253)
The president said forcefully and categorically that the Special Counsel did not write something that in fact the Special Counsel did write on at least ten occasions: Biden shared classified information with his ghostwriter. This is not an instance of an eighty-one year old's faulty long-term memory--the president read the pertinent sections of the report and then made his statements at a press conference the same day. Nor is this an instance of a decline in reading comprehension ability; it is willful disinformation intended to discredit the Special Counsel on a point that the Special Counsel determined he could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt was willful violation of criminal law. The president lied.
