Audio recordings that Joe Biden fought for years to keep private – in which he acknowledges possessing classified material after leaving office as US vice-president – have been released by Republicans in Congress. <\/p>\n
The tapes contain interviews between Biden, now 83, and a ghostwriter working on his 2017 memoir, titled Promise Me, Dad. <\/p>\n
“I just found all the classified stuff downstairs,” Biden is heard saying at one point in the audio, recorded in February 2017, a month after he left the White House.<\/p>\n
House Republicans and a conservative nonprofit, the Oversight Project, sued for the tapes, which were handed over for a 2024 justice department probe into Biden’s handling of the records.<\/p>\n
Biden’s spokesman, TJ Ducklo, said in a statement that releasing the tapes was “just the latest example of this Administration weaponizing the DOJ for political retribution”. <\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
The audio was recorded during the drafting of the 2017 memoir that Biden penned with co-writer Mark Zwonitzer. <\/p>\n
At one point in the more than two hours of tapes released on Monday, Biden tells the ghostwriter: “The next thing I have here is, um, this is classified.”<\/p>\n
In an October 2016 recording, he tells Zwonitzer: “I have extensive notes over this period of time\u2026 They [the White House] didn’t know I have this.”<\/p>\n
At the time, Biden was still serving as vice-president to Barack Obama.<\/p>\n
During Biden’s tenure as president from 2021-25, the justice department declined to release the audio tapes. <\/p>\n
In May, his personal lawyers sued the justice department in an effort to keep the tapes private, but after legal defeats they dropped their lawsuit.<\/p>\n
The recordings contain significant redactions, which Republicans on the House Oversight Committee say “are intended to cover [Biden’s] disclosure of classified information”.<\/p>\n
In 2024, Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained the recordings and transcripts while investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents.<\/p>\n
Hur found Biden improperly retained records, but he did not recommend charges, partly because of concerns that a jury would take his side and view him as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.<\/p>\n
Donald Trump was charged with illegally retaining the documents at his home in Florida, but the charges were dropped after he returned to the White House.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Audio recordings that Joe Biden fought for years to keep private – in which he acknowledges possessing classified…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":714801,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-714800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=714800"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/714800\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/714801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=714800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=714800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=714800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}