CNN’s Elie Honig: Joe Biden DID Mislead the Public on Classified Docs, But Decision to Not Charge Was Sound

CNN legal analyst Elie Honig weighed in on Tuesday’s House hearing with Special Counsel Robert Hur and offered his main takeaways both from the hearing and Hur’s report detailing his decision not to charge President Joe Biden.

“A couple main takeaways. There was no charge recommended by Robert Hur, and I think he ran an extensive and really impressive investigation. I think his fact-finding left very little uncovered, and I think his analysis was sound and fair,” Honig began, adding:

However, he did find some evidence of criminality. He did find evidence, pretty clear cut evidence that Joe Biden retained classified documents, knew he retained them as evidence on that tape, and did not immediately turn them back over. The other thing that I think is important to note is that Joe Biden did mislead the public, as did other members of Joe Biden’s team, because for the past year or so, the talking point and we’ve seen this repeated many times has been it was entirely unintentional by Joe Biden – he had no idea he had any of these documents.

“Things get moved around. Whoops. What are you going to do?” It turns out that is somewhat fair when it comes to some of the documents, but not others. He absolutely knew he had these documents. I do think the decision not to charge him was a close one, but I think it was sound.

Legal analyst Jennifer Rodgers agreed, saying, “I mean, I think that, we were talking about this a little bit at break, there’s been a little bit of muddying about this notion of if you get in front of a jury, what the jury is going to do.”

“I mean, almost sounds like he was saying, well, we had the proof. We think we have the proof. But, you know, you never know what a juror will do with an old man with a faulty memory. And so we decided not to charge. But then, you know, it became clear when you look at the report and he says, basically, we didn’t have the proof,” she added, concluding:

There’s insufficient proof. So there’s been there was a little bit of confusion, I think, around this. And this went to the Republicans trying to say, you know, he was guilty, but you let him off because of the old man defense. But really, if you can’t prove your case to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, you don’t bring the case. I mean, especially talking about charging a president.

Watch the clip above via CNN.