Joe Biden’s lawyers fought for more than two years to keep the American people from hearing what their client sounded like in 2016 and 2017. On Monday, we found out why.
The Oversight Project released audio recordings of Biden’s interviews with Mark Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter behind his 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad,” after the former president abandoned his legal fight to block their disclosure. The full interview series reportedly ran roughly 70 hours; the clips released Monday total nearly three hours. And in those three hours, Biden manages to confirm the two things his defenders spent years denying.
He knew he was handling classified information, and his mind was slipping years before the 2020 campaign ever began.
“Some of this may be classified so be careful with it,” Biden told Zwonitzer in an April 2017 session, months after leaving the vice presidency. In a separate interview recorded in November 2016, while he still held office, he flagged material in his notes as classified mid-sentence before continuing on.
He also boasted about keeping extensive personal notes from his years in the White House, remarking that officials there never knew he had them.
Stop and consider what that means. This was not a confused old man stumbling into a technical violation. This was a sitting vice president, and later a private citizen, telling a writer with no security clearance that the material in front of them might be classified, and then sharing it anyway.
The warning itself is the confession. You do not tell someone to be careful with information unless you understand exactly what that information is.
Hur Documented It All and Walked Away
Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained these recordings during his investigation into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. His February 2024 report concluded that Biden willfully retained classified materials and read classified notebook entries to Zwonitzer nearly verbatim on at least three occasions.