The latest on the 2024 presidential race

Former President Donald Trump on Friday railed against a special counsel's decision not to recommend charges against President Joe Biden over his handling of classified documents while attacking the president's mental state.

Trump, who is facing charges related to mishandling of classified documents, called it a "sick and corrupt two-tiered system of justice." 

In a report released Thursday, Special Counsel Robert Hur did not recommend charges against Biden over his handling of classified documents. In his explanation for not recommending prosecution, Hur described the president as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Trump, addressing a National Rifle Association rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, said Biden did "a lot" of the activity related to retaining documents "when he was at a very young age."

"He was mentally a little better than he is right now," he continued, addressing Biden's mental acuity, something he did not immediately seize on yesterday in the wake of the report.

The former president also said Biden had made recovery of classified documents by investigators "almost impossible," later claiming that he cooperated with investigators more than Biden did.

However, Hur made clear in his report how different Biden's and Trump’s classified information cases are — namely, that Biden cooperated with investigators while Trump did not.

Special Counsel Robert Hur’s report on President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified information has reignited controversy over special counsels and their investigative reports, which are designed to publicly disclose findings — including negative ones — even if prosecutors are declining to bring charges. 

Attorney General Merrick Garland received Hur’s final report on February 5, according to the Justice Department, and immediately was confronted with how to handle the special counsel’s harsh assessment of the president’s conduct, including language saying that a jury could see him as an “elderly man with a poor memory." 

The closing of the investigation will soon also present the Justice Department and the White House with a new decision on what to do about any audio recordings of the president’s interview last October with the Special Counsel and his 2017 discussions with his ghostwriter, as well as other materials from the investigation.

Special counsels, of course, have been full of controversy dating back decades, regardless of whether they lead to an indictment, from Ken Starr’s investigation of former President Bill Clinton to Robert Mueller’s probe into former President Donald Trump — and now Jack Smith’s twin indictments of the former president. 

Garland and other top Justice Department officials had the option to try to remove some of the characterizations in Hur’s report that the White House says were gratuitous and false. 

But the repercussions of doing so are clear: Garland would have to report to Congress the information he was removing, which would immediately undermine the independence of the investigation and fuel more allegations of partisanship. 

Former President Donald Trump mocked Joe Biden after the president mistakenly called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi the president of Mexico at a news conference on Thursday. 

Trump posted a map on Truth Social on Friday that labels Egypt as Mexico with the words, "Source: Joe Biden." He also posted the clip where Biden calls el-Sisi the president of Mexico. 

Biden made the mistake as he dismissed criticisms of memory lapses outlined in special counsel Robert Hur's searing report. Hur did not recommend charges against Biden over his handling of classified documents. 

President Joe Biden gave a press conference Thursday night after the release of a report from special counsel Robert Hur, who announced that Biden would not face charges over his handling of classified information from prior to his presidency.

Biden was combative, forcefully rejecting Hur’s claims that he has a poor memory. But the president was also repeatedly inaccurate, making three claims that were clearly contradicted by Hur’s report.

Here is a fact check of some of the claims.

Where the classified materials were stored: Biden sought to contrast his handling of classified material with that of former President Donald Trump, who faces felony charges for willfully retaining classified documents. (Hur agreed that there were major distinctions between the two cases.) But while Biden correctly noted that the documents were in a private home that is very different from the Mar-a-Lago social club where Trump lives, Biden embellished his argument with a false claim.

Biden said: “All the stuff that was in my home was in filing cabinets that were either locked or able to be locked.”

The classification level of documents Biden had in his possession: Biden claimed of the documents he possessed: “None of it was high classified. It didn’t have any of that red stuff on it, you know what I mean, around the corners? None of that.”

See more fact checks on Biden's comments about the special counsel's report.

The White House defended President Joe Biden’s decision to speak to special counsel Robert Hur the day after the October 7 terrorist attacks in Israel, despite the Biden team’s repeated references to the president being distracted by world events during his interview. 

He said that Hur told Biden he wanted him to “try to recall to the best of your abilities.” 

He said that Biden “wanted to make sure he had everything he needed, and he didn't want to throw up roadblocks" which is why he agreed to move forward with the interview.

The White House also didn't rule out the possibility of releasing the transcript of the interviews, with the caveat that any classified information would have to be redacted, according to Sams.

Vice President Kamala Harris forcefully defended President Joe Biden’s mental acuity on Friday and lambasted special counsel Robert Hur’s report as politically motivated.

Harris recounted in detail the experience serving alongside Biden in the aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, noting that she was in “almost every meeting” with him and his national security team in the days that followed. Biden sat for interviews with Hur on October 8 and 9. 

“He was in front of it all coordinating and directing leaders who are in charge of America’s national security, not to mention our allies around the globe," the vice president said.

She also slammed Hur’s characterization of Biden’s mental fitness and questioned the conservative special counsel’s integrity.

“The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly politically motivated, gratuitous. And so I will say that when it comes to the role and responsibility of a prosecutor in a situation like that, we should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity of what we saw,” she said. 

Former President Donald Trump and his allies are pushing to replace the chair of the Republican National Committee (RNC) with North Carolina’s party leader who promoted 2020 presidential election lies and supported using the courts to overturn the results.

Michael Whatley, the chair of the North Carolina Republican Party, shared false claims that Republican observers were prevented from accessing polling locations and repeatedly said Democratic cities in swing states were engaged in “massive fraud,” a CNN KFile review of Whatley’s comments following the election found. 

Following the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Whatley condemned those who broke into the Capitol building, but said the Republican Party as “a whole” was not complicit and suggested rioters were not "Republican voters."

Whatley, who has since acknowledged Joe Biden is the country’s legitimate president, currently serves as general counsel at the RNC overseeing litigation and what the organization calls its “election integrity” efforts.

His elevation to RNC chair could give Trump a loyalist more willing to devote resources to pursue future voter fraud claims in court should they arise. One reason why Trump soured on Ronna McDaniel, the current chair, was his perception she should have done more to fight for his candidacy in 2020, CNN reported.

Like many Republicans, Whatley publicly backed Trump’s voter fraud claims on multiple occasions following the 2020 election.

Dive deeper into what Whatley has said and the state of the RNC.

GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley said special counsel Robert Hur’s report that did not charge President Biden with a crime, but painted a picture of apparent lapses in memory from the president who failed to properly protect highly sensitive classified information, should be a “wake-up call” for both Democrats and Republicans. 

Haley also took aim at former President Donald Trump saying, that he "has his own mental deficiencies, is prone to temper tantrums and wild rants, and confuses countries and who was in charge of Capitol security on January 6th.”

"I have long said: the first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate will win the White House. Democrats appear on their way to doing just that. Trump runs about even with the enfeebled Biden; he would get crushed by a Democrat with a pulse,” Haley added.

The Biden House held an election security drill in December — the first such meeting in the three years of this administration — where senior national security officials faced a pair of stark, simulated scenarios that tested the limits of any federal response to election-related chaos, four people familiar with the meeting told CNN.

Questions they faced: What if Chinese operatives created a fake AI-generated video showing a Senate candidate destroying ballots? And how should federal agencies respond if violence erupts at polling stations on Election Day?

For nearly an hour, the No. 2 officials at the FBI, CIA and departments of Homeland Security and Justice wrestled with how to respond to the deepfake video, including whether and how to notify the public about the activity if they weren’t sure that China was behind it, the sources told CNN.

Where federal response stands: When it comes to a coordinated federal response to things like rampant disinformation, deepfakes and the harassment of election officials, “We’re all f—king tied up in knots,” said one US official familiar with the election security drill.

The participants opted for state election officials, and not the federal government, to lead any public messaging to counter disinformation spread by the fake video in their jurisdictions, two of the sources said. Officials also discussed options for notifying Congress.

As for violence at the polls, the federal officials decided not to dispatch federal agents to support local police because they did not have the jurisdiction to do so.

Read more about CNN's exclusive story on 2024 election threats.

CNN’s Evan Perez, Natasha Bertrand, Donie O’Sullivan and Katie Bo Lillis contributed to this report.