A federal court cleared the way, Biden’s lawyers finally stopped fighting, and Monday night, the audio hit the public. Three hours of recordings. A hundred-seventeen pages of transcripts. Joe Biden, in his own voice, talking to his memoir ghostwriter about classified documents he wasn’t supposed to have.
The Oversight Project, a Heritage Foundation legal arm, spent years in court prying these loose. The tapes stem from Special Counsel Robert Hur’s 2023 investigation into Biden’s handling of classified material. Hur declined to charge him, writing in his 2024 report that a jury would likely see Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Democrats went nuclear over that line. Kamala Harris called the report “inaccurate and inappropriate.” Rep. Dan Goldman said Hur “completely went out of his way to editorialize.” They insisted it was a partisan hit job.
The tapes don’t cooperate with that story.
Biden is heard during an October 2016 session, still serving as Obama’s vice president, discussing sensitive foreign policy matters with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer. “They didn’t even know I had this,” he said. Then in 2017, already out of office, he mentioned finding classified documents at his home: “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” He described a 40-page memo he claimed to have written to Obama arguing against the Afghanistan troop surge. That section is redacted in what was released.
The memory problems are on tape too. In one April 2017 session, Biden couldn’t pull up the names of two economic advisers. “I’ll think of his name,” he told Zwonitzer. “I should write the names down because I keep forgetting them.” There was a long pause before Zwonitzer fed him the name Alan Krueger. In another exchange, Biden blanked on the name of a dead service member whose memorial he said he attended, and couldn’t remember the date.
Jeff Clark of the Oversight Project put it plainly: “The knowledge of his deterioration was well-established. The tapes have always belonged to the American People, the Oversight Project just delivered them to their rightful owner.”
Biden’s spokesman TJ Ducklo called the release “the latest example of this Administration weaponizing the DOJ for political retribution,” noting the conversations were provided to Justice under a confidentiality agreement. Biden had sued to block the release entirely, but a D.C. Circuit panel voted 2-1 that the public interest outweighed his privacy claims. He didn’t petition the Supreme Court. He just let it go.
