The Department of Justice informed a federal judge on Monday that it possesses transcripts of President Joe Biden’s conversations with his biographer from the classified documents investigation, despite previously stating otherwise. In a court filing, the DOJ revealed that it had located transcripts of recorded discussions between Biden and biographer Mark Zwonitzer, during which classified information was shared. This discovery was made as part of an ongoing legal battle with the Heritage Foundation regarding access to materials from special counsel Robert Hur’s probe into the president. The DOJ’s acknowledgment of the existence of these transcripts contradicts its previous claim in June that no such transcripts had been created by the special counsel.
This revelation comes on the heels of Biden’s decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race. The DOJ recently uncovered that transcripts of Biden’s conversations with Zwonitzer were compiled by Hur’s office, shedding light on discussions that took place while the biographer was working on Biden’s memoirs in 2007 and 2017. The Justice Department had previously stated that reviewing hours of recorded conversations for classified content is a significantly more challenging and time-consuming task than examining written materials.
“In the past few days…the Department located six electronic files, consisting of a total of 117 pages, that appeared to be verbatim transcripts of a small subset of the Biden-Zwonitzer audio recordings created for the SCO by a court-reporting service,” DOJ Attorney Cameron Silverberg wrote in the Monday court filing.
Silverberg, the DOJ attorney, stated in court on June 18 that there is no transcript created by the special counsel that they can vouch for its accuracy, according to Politico.
The DOJ has faced numerous FOIA requests from media outlets and conservative groups since Hur released his report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents in February. The report concluded that the president should not be charged, in part because a jury might perceive him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Subsequently, the DOJ has not released audio recordings of Biden’s October 2023 interviews with Hur to complement the publicly released transcripts, which show the president appearing to forget the years he was vice president and the year his eldest son passed away.
Democrats and Biden allies criticized Hur and his report, claiming that the language about the president’s mental acuity was unnecessary and that Hur was a partisan seeking to undermine Biden with about nine months until Election Day. Biden withdrew from the presidential race on Sunday after facing significant internal pressure from other Democrats concerned that the public might permanently view Biden as too frail to win an election following his poor performance at the late June presidential debate.
