Biden was 74 when the interviews began and 81 when Hur released his report in early 2024, as he sought re-election.
Newly released audio recordings appear to show former US President Joe Biden discussing classified information with his memoir ghostwriter and at times struggling to recall details during interviews conducted before his 2020 election.
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Around three hours of audio and 117 pages of partially redacted transcripts were released by the Oversight Project, a conservative group affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, after Biden lost a lengthy legal battle to keep his conversations with ghostwriter Mark Lewis Zwonitzer private.
“They didn't even know I had this,” Biden told Zwonitzer in October 2016, near the end of his second term as Barack Obama's vice president, as he talked about sensitive foreign policy matters handled by the administration.
In one 2017 interview, after leaving the White House and before launching his own presidential campaign, Biden appeared to acknowledge that he had retained classified information from his time as vice president.
“I just found all the classified stuff downstairs,” Biden said. “I wrote the President a handwritten 40-page memorandum arguing against deploying additional troops to Iraq - I mean, to Afghanistan on the grounds that it wouldn’t matter, that the day we left would be like the day before we arrived.”
The potentially classified information itself is redacted in both the audio and transcripts that the Oversight Project released.
The conservative group sued to obtain the recordings after Special Counsel Robert Hur decided in 2024 not to charge Biden over his handling of classified information.
Biden cooperated with Hur’s inquiry and told the special prosecutor during his presidency that he did not intentionally mishandle any classified material.
In announcing his decision, Hur said he believed a jury would view Biden as a sympathetic figure because of his age and what he described as a "poor memory" - a remark that fuelled public debate over the then-president's age and fitness for office.
Biden blasts release as 'politically motivated'
At the Oversight Project, Vice President of Litigation Jeff Clark insisted the tapes prove Biden's decline.
“The tapes have always belonged to the American People, the Oversight Project just delivered them to their rightful owner,” Clark said in a statement. “The knowledge of his deterioration was well-established.”
A Biden spokesman blasted the release as politically motivated.
“President Biden’s conversations for a book a decade ago that discussed his late son are private, and were provided to the Department of Justice on the express condition they stay that way,” said TJ Ducklo.
“Reversing course and making them public is just the latest example of this Administration weaponizing the DOJ for political retribution.”
Biden unsuccessfully tried to block the Justice Department from releasing the recordings. A divided federal appeals court ruled there was a "substantial" public interest in making the material public.