Speaker Johnson Claims Biden Special Counsel Report Found the President ‘Broke The Law’ — It Word For Word Says The Opposite

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) claimed during a Capitol Hill press conference on Wednesday that Special Counsel Robert Hur found that President Joe Biden “broke the law, but he’s not going to be charged.” Hur’s 345-page report detailing his investigation in Biden’s retention of classified materials was made public last Thursday and while it included some brutal passages about Biden’s memory, the report explicitly says Hur and his team “conclude[d] that the evidence does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

“We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” begins the report, which goes on to detail Hur could not establish a crime was committed as he lacked evidence to prove Biden both knew he was taking classified information and intentionally distributed it.

Johnson offered his own version of Hur’s report, saying, “Americans have been speaking out about the president’s mental acuity and the double standards within his Justice Department.”

“On Thursday, as you know, the special counsel confirmed that President Biden mishandled classified materials in a way that presented serious risks to national security,” Johnson continued, adding:

He broke the law, but he’s not going to be charged. Why is that? Well, special counsel said that it decided not to indict the president, in part because there are significant limitations on his memory. And a jury wouldn’t convict him because he would be presented as, quote, “An elderly man with a poor memory.”

That did not inspire confidence among the American people. It’s of great concern to us. Ultimately they’re indicting, remember now the DOJ is indicting one president with politically motivated charges, and they are now carrying the water for another amid very similar allegations. A man two incapable of being held accountable for mishandling classified information is certainly unfit for the Oval Office. And everyone in this room. If you just ask yourself that question, you will come to the same conclusion.

What Hur’s report actually does is go through each incident of Biden retaining classified information and explain why he concluded Biden’s conduct did not reach a criminal standard.

For example on pages 9 and 10 of the report, Hur writes:

Mr. Biden should have 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.

Toward the end of the report, page 329, Hur writes about notebooks Biden kept, “For each of the marked classified documents found in Mr. Biden’s notebooks, we cannot prove that Mr. Biden knew about or intended to keep the document after he was vice president, or we cannot prove the document contains national defense information, or both. These documents do not support criminal charges against Mr. Biden.”

“These facts do not support a conclusion that Mr. Biden willfully retained the marked classified documents in these binders. The cover of one binder was marked unclassified, the other had no classification marking, and we cannot show that Mr. Biden reviewed the binders after his vice presidency or knew the classified documents were inside. It is plausible that he retained these documents by mistake,” Hur writes a few pages later.

Hur’s report contains dozens of similar paragraphs regarding his conclusion that Biden did not break the law in retaining classified documents.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, on the other hand, cited a recording of former President Donald Trump telling a staffer “this is secret information” while discussing a document he retained. The transcript of that recording is a key detail in Smith’s indictment of Trump.

Watch the clip above via C-SPAN.