Then-Vice President Joe Biden considered resigning from his post under former President Barack Obama over disagreements with the administration’s policies during the Afghanistan War, according to excerpts of the special counsel report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.

As Obama approved sending troops to Afghanistan throughout 2009, Biden repeatedly pushed back on that decision as a “strategic blunder” that would “bring [Obama’s] administration down.” At one point, the vice president even considered stepping down in protest, according to notes Biden made in his notebook shortly after Thanksgiving in 2009.

“Tomorrow the President is going to make a fateful decision regarding Afghanistan — as I sat looking out the window at the sea — thinking I should resign in protest over what will bring his administration down,” Biden wrote. “Although I obviously wasn’t there I feel like this is what it must have felt like for Kennedy then Johnson in the early days of VTN [Vietnam]. I feel guilty and boxed in myself. Guilty for not having been more successful w/ the President — and staying. Boxed in by knowing or at least feeling that my resignation would only harden his position and leave him with one less voice.”

Biden strongly opposed the decision to send troops to Afghanistan, which was documented in several entries in the then-vice president’s notes cited in special counsel Robert Hur’s report. Biden had even sent a memo to then-President Obama that “strongly criticized” the plan in an attempt to change his mind.

Biden later relayed to Hur that he sent the memo “because I was trying to change the President’s mind, and I wanted to let him know I was ready to speak out … and to really, quite frankly, save his a**.”

That memo was among the classified documents found in Biden’s Delaware home alongside other marked documents, according to the special counsel report. Hur concluded that Biden had “a strong motive” to keep the documents as they helped preserve the record that he opposed the Obama administration’s Afghanistan policies.

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“He wanted record to show that he was right about Afghanistan; that his critics were wrong; and that he had opposed President Obama’s mistaken decision forcefully when it was made — that his judgment was sound when it mattered most,” the report stated. “This evidence provides grounds to believe that Mr. Biden willfully retained the marked classified documents about Afghanistan.”

Although the special counsel report found that Biden has mishandled classified government documents, Hur said the conduct did not warrant criminal charges.