Joe Biden “willfully retained” and disclosed highly classified materials when he was a private citizen, risking “serious damage to America’s national security,” Special Counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents found.

Despite this, the Biden Justice Department says no criminal charges will be leveled against him, in part, because his cognitive state is so “limited,” his attorneys would be able to use his inability to remember anything about the documents as a defense.

“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur wrote in  the eye-opening 388-page report, released Thursday after a yearlong investigation.

Biden’s memory “appeared to have significant limitations,” investigators found.

The best case for charges reportedly involved his possession, as a private citizen, of classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan.

But sympathetic prosecutors said it was possible that Biden could have found those records at his Virginia home in 2017 and then forgotten about them soon after.

Biden apparently could not remember basic facts about Afghanistan during his recorded conversations with Mark Zwonitzer, the ghost writer for his 2017 book “promise Me Dad.”

“Mr. Biden’s recorded conversations with Zwonitzer from 2017 are often painfully slow, with Mr. EBden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries,” the report states.

The report said, Biden insisted that the notebooks were “my property” and that “every president before me has done the exact same thing.”

His memory was allegedly “worse” when he was interviewed by the Special Counsel.

“He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”),” according to the Special Counsel. “He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died,” the report adds.

And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Eiden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama.

The Special Counsel suggested that Biden’s mental decline would be used as a defense by his lawyers.

“In a case where the government must prove that Mr. Biden knew he had possession of the classified Afghanistan documents after the vice presidency and chose to keep those documents, knowing he was violating the law, we expect that at trial, his attorneys would emphasize these limitations in his recall,” the report says.

The report, nevertheless, represents a scathing assessment of Biden’s handling of sensitive government documents, the according to the Associated Press.

The documents have classification markings up to the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information Level and were found in a box in Biden’s Delaware garage “that contained other materials of great significance to him and that he appears to have personally used and accessed.”

Photographs included in the report showed some of the classified Afghanistan documents stored in a worn cardboard box stored in his garage, apparently in a loose collection with other household items, including a ladder and a wicker basket.

Classified documents from the Obama administration were also found in Biden’s basement den, according to the report. Classified documents from his time in the Senate in the 1970s and 1980s were also found in his garage .

“Mr. Biden was known to remove and keep classified material from his briefing books for future use, and his staff struggled — and sometimes failed — to retrieve those materials,” the report states. “And there was no procedure at all for tracking some of the classified material Mr. Biden received outside of his briefing books”

While Biden reportedly can’t be prosecuted as a sitting president, Hur’s report argues that he would not recommend charges against Biden regardless.

“We would reach the same conclusion even if Department of Justice policy did not foreclose criminal charges against a sitting president,” the report said.