Audio recordings that Joe Biden fought for years to maintain personal – in which he acknowledges possessing classified materials after leaving workplace as US vice-president – have been launched by Republicans in Congress.
The tapes include interviews between Biden, now 83, and a ghostwriter engaged on his 2017 memoir, titled Promise Me, Dad.
“I just found all the classified stuff downstairs,” Biden is heard saying at one level in the audio, recorded in February 2017, a month after he left the White House.
House Republicans and a conservative nonprofit, the Oversight Project, sued for the tapes, which had been handed over for a 2024 justice division probe into Biden’s dealing with of the information.
Biden’s spokesman, TJ Ducklo, stated in an announcement that releasing the tapes was “just the latest example of this Administration weaponizing the DOJ for political retribution”.
“It’s wrong, and while President Biden disagrees with today’s decision, he also respects the courts and the vital role an independent judiciary plays in a healthy democracy,” he added.
The audio was recorded throughout the drafting of the 2017 memoir that Biden penned with co-writer Mark Zwonitzer.
At one level in the greater than two hours of tapes launched on Monday, Biden tells the ghostwriter: “The next thing I have here is, um, this is classified.”
In an October 2016 recording, he tells Zwonitzer: “I have extensive notes over this period of time… They [the White House] didn’t know I have this.”
At the time, Biden was nonetheless serving as vice-president to Barack Obama.
During Biden’s tenure as president from 2021-25, the justice division declined to launch the audio tapes.
In May, his private attorneys sued the justice division in an effort to maintain the tapes personal, however after authorized defeats they dropped their lawsuit.
The recordings include vital redactions, which Republicans on the House Oversight Committee say “are intended to cover [Biden’s] disclosure of classified information”.
In 2024, Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained the recordings and transcripts whereas investigating Biden’s dealing with of classified paperwork.
Hur found Biden improperly retained information, however he didn’t advocate expenses, partly due to considerations {that a} jury would take his aspect and examine him as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.
Donald Trump was charged with illegally retaining the paperwork at his house in Florida, however the expenses had been dropped after he returned to the White House.
