The Justice Department argued in a court filing on Friday that it cannot release audio of President Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur due to fears of deepfakes.
The motion was made as part of a legal challenge to Biden’s attempt to invoke executive privilege to keep the recordings from being made public. In its motion on Friday, the Justice Department acknowledged that there is already enough public audio to create AI deepfakes of Biden and Heo, but said releasing the actual recordings would make it more difficult to disprove the false versions.
“The passage of time and advances in audio, artificial intelligence, and ‘deepfake’ technology only increase concerns about malicious manipulation of audio files. It is not difficult to foresee that if an audio recording were publicly available here, it could be improperly altered, and the altered file could be passed off as a genuine recording and widely distributed,” the department wrote.
Assistant Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer wrote in the filing that the release of the tapes “will significantly increase the ability of bad actors to disguise deepfakes as authentic recordings.”
Biden asserts executive privilege over records of classified investigation
The Department of Justice has announced that it cannot release audio of President Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur due to concerns about potential deepfakes. (Ting Sheng/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The Biden administration is facing numerous attacks from conservative legal groups and House Republicans seeking to force the release of the audio. The Justice Department has already released transcripts of the interviews, which reveal several embarrassing moments for the president.
It was Biden, not Special Counsel Har, who asked about his son’s death.
Biden met with Ho for about five hours last year and was grilled about his handling of classified documents.
Har’s report, released earlier this year, declared Biden to be a forgetful but well-meaning older man. It cited several instances in which Biden could not remember important details about his life, including when he served as vice president and the year his son Beau Biden died.
The Democratic National Committee paid a lawyer representing President Biden, who was under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Hur for allegedly possessing classified documents. (Getty Images)
Biden was infuriated by the report and was later found to have made a number of false statements about the interview, including claiming that Heo had brought up the topic of Beau’s death, when Biden was on record as mentioning it.
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“President Biden appears to be afraid that the public and anyone in this country will hear the tape,” the House speaker said. Mike JohnsonThe Louisiana Republican said after Biden invoked privilege regarding the tapes, “They clearly corroborate the special counsel’s findings and will cause great alarm to the American people that, in his view, the president is using all of his power to try to block the release of those tapes.”
Biden was outraged that Heo’s report portrayed him as mentally incompetent and elderly. (Hannah Beyer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
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Some Republicans have speculated that the transcript of the interview doesn’t match the audio and may have been edited to avoid embarrassing Biden. Weinsheimer denied those claims in a filing on Friday, saying the transcript had only minor edits, such as removing repetitive words and filler phrases.
