More than two hours of audio recordings released by House Republicans capture Joe Biden casually telling his memoir ghostwriter that he possessed classified material, tapes the 83-year-old former president spent years trying to keep from the public.
The recordings, made during Biden's interviews with co-writer Mark Zwonitzer for his 2017 memoir Promise Me, Dad, include Biden stating plainly in February 2017, roughly a month after leaving the vice presidency, "I just found all the classified stuff downstairs." In another clip, he tells Zwonitzer, "The next thing I have here is, um, this is classified." A third excerpt, recorded in October 2016 while Biden still served as vice president under Barack Obama, captures him saying, "I have extensive notes over this period of time... They [the White House] didn't know I have this."
The tapes landed after a prolonged legal fight. House Republicans and the Oversight Project, a conservative nonprofit, sued for the recordings. Biden's personal lawyers sued the Justice Department to block their release, arguing that "every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home." They lost in court and eventually dropped the lawsuit.
Biden's spokesman TJ Ducklo called the release "just the latest example of this Administration weaponizing the DOJ for political retribution." He added that Biden "disagrees with today's decision" but "respects the courts and the vital role an independent judiciary plays in a healthy democracy."
The recordings were originally obtained by Special Counsel Robert Hur during his 2024 investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents. Hur found that Biden had improperly retained records but did not recommend criminal charges, citing concerns that a jury would view Biden as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." During Biden's presidency, the DOJ declined to release the audio.
The recordings released Monday are only a fraction of what exists. A federal judge ruled against Biden's attempt to block roughly 70 hours of audio made during the memoir sessions with Zwonitzer. U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich wrote that "the harm to Biden's diminished privacy interest is outweighed by the public's interest in the Zwonitzer materials and FOIA's policy of broad disclosure of Government documents in order to ensure an informed citizenry."
The House Judiciary Committee posted nearly three hours of audio along with a 117-page transcript. The transcript contains heavy redactions. House Republicans on the Oversight Committee said those redactions "are intended to cover [Biden's] disclosure of classified information."
Biden fought for years to suppress these recordings, and the reason is now audible. The tapes do not capture a man who accidentally stumbled across a stray memo. They capture a former vice president who acknowledged, on tape, possessing classified material and sharing notes the White House did not know he had, with a private citizen who held no security clearance.
Special Counsel Hur's report went further than the audio excerpts alone suggest. Hur found that "at least three times, Mr. Biden read classified notes from national security meetings to Zwonitzer nearly verbatim," as stated on page 244 of his report. Yet Hur concluded that "the evidence falls short of proving that Mr. Biden did so willfully", a legal distinction that spared Biden from prosecution.
The path these tapes traveled to reach the public raises its own questions. Zwonitzer allegedly deleted audio recordings from his computer after the classified documents investigation began. FBI specialists recovered them. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan subsequently subpoenaed Zwonitzer for all communications, contracts, payments, audio recordings, and transcripts related to both Biden memoirs.
Biden abandoned his legal fight to keep the recordings private only after an appeals court rejected his privacy claims. His lawyers had argued the DOJ bore "a particular responsibility to protect" private information obtained through a criminal investigation. The courts disagreed.
The Oversight Project's president, Mike Howell, offered a blunt assessment. He said the tapes "never should have been hidden" and called Special Counsel Hur's investigation "a complete controlled demolition to let Biden off the hook." Howell also pointed to what the recordings reveal about Biden's mental state years before he entered the Oval Office, telling Just The News that "these tapes have so many pauses and ums that it sounds like Biden is buffering like a dial-up Internet connection."
The recordings document memory lapses as early as April 2017, including Biden forgetting the name of his own economic advisor, Alan Krueger. Those struggles predated his presidency by nearly four years.
The contrast between how Biden and Donald Trump were treated on classified documents has drawn persistent scrutiny. Trump was charged with illegally retaining documents at his home in Florida. Those charges were dropped after he returned to the White House. Biden, who BBC News reported was found to have improperly retained records, faced no charges at all, shielded in part by Hur's assessment that a jury would find him too sympathetic and too forgetful to convict.
Ducklo's framing, that the release amounts to "political retribution", asks the public to accept that hearing a former president's own words, on tape, about classified material he kept hidden constitutes an abuse of power. The Biden family's long effort to keep these recordings sealed suggests they understood the damage the tapes would do.
Significant questions remain. What classified material, specifically, did Biden possess? What do the redacted portions of the transcript contain? Who applied the redactions, and under what authority? Were the recordings released in full beyond those redactions, or only in excerpts? The 70 hours of total audio dwarf the two-plus hours made public so far.
Biden's decision to drop his lawsuit blocking the tapes came only after he had exhausted his legal options. He did not release them voluntarily. He did not cooperate. He fought, lost, and quit. The public now has the recordings not because Biden respected transparency, but because courts ordered it and Congress demanded it.
Newsmax reported that the DOJ has now been cleared to release the full body of recordings after two legal obstacles were removed. If the first two hours are any indication, the remaining 68 hours may tell the country more about what Biden kept, what he shared, and what he tried to hide.
When a former president's own voice is the evidence, "political retribution" is a hard sell. The tapes speak for themselves, and that is exactly what Biden spent years trying to prevent.