A recording related to an interview with the ghostwriter of former President Joe Biden’s memoir has become public during the classified documents investigation led by Special Counsel Robert Hur.
This release follows a lengthy struggle with Biden’s legal team, who ultimately abandoned their attempt to keep the recordings private, a decision that was approved by a judge on Monday.
Mike Howell, previously with the conservative Heritage Foundation and now involved with the Oversight Project, invested over two years fighting to access these materials via FOIA requests. He argued it was essential for the public to examine the recordings and transcripts pivotal to Hur’s findings.
The Oversight Project has made available over 70 hours of recordings featuring Biden’s conversations with his memoir ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, from 2016 and 2017. In these recordings, the former vice president appears to pause frequently, stumble over words, and have difficulty recalling details, which reflects Hur’s assessment in his report.
Jeff Clark, the Vice President of Litigation at the Oversight Project, commented to FOX News Digital that Biden likely wasn’t pleased about the tapes being released after such a protracted period of delays. His remarks hinted at a broader reconsideration of how Biden has been treated regarding classified material.
Hur’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents dates back to when he served as vice president and as a senator from Delaware. Ultimately, he decided against filing criminal charges, concluding there wasn’t enough evidence to prove that Biden intentionally retained or divulged the documents.
In his report, Hur described Biden’s speech as “painfully slow” and noted that he faced challenges with memory during both his 2017 interview with Zwonitzer and a subsequent one in 2023 with the investigators.
Hur posited that a potential reason for not prosecuting Biden could be that jurors might view him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” rather than a willful violator of the law regarding classified documents.
