Biden admits he has ‘classified’ material in ghostwriter tapes
Former US President Joe Biden has admitted to possessing classified material in newly released audio tapes recorded with his biographer.
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- A conservative think tank released audio and transcripts of interviews between Joe Biden and his memoir’s ghostwriter.
- In the recordings, Biden says he retained classified information.
- The release follows a court battle in which Biden’s legal team dropped its lawsuit to block the materials from becoming public.
Joe Biden tells a ghostwriter in materials released by a conservative think tank that he kept classified information from his tenure as vice president.
Three hours of audio and 117 pages of transcripts were released by the Oversight Project, a branch of the Heritage Foundation, on July 27 after the former president dropped a lawsuit seeking to block the public release of his conversations with Mark Lewis Zwonitzer, a ghostwriter for his memoir.
“They didn’t even know I had this,” Biden told Zwonitzer during an October 2016 interview about sensitive foreign policy matters handled by the Obama administration under which Biden served two terms as vice president.
In an audio clip from 2017, Biden told Zwonitzer that he’d found 2009 documents in his house related to strategy in Afghanistan.
“I just found all the classified stuff downstairs,” said Biden. “I wrote (then-President Barack Obama) 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 release of the audio and transcripts came days after Biden’s attorneys filed a notice of voluntary dismissal on July 24 in U.S. District Court in Washington. The public release of the material, with the potentially classified information redacted, also came more than a month after a federal judge ruled that hours of audio recordings tied to Biden’s memoir could be turned over to the Heritage Foundation, rejecting his bid to block the disclosure.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich said in a June 20 ruling that Biden’s privacy interests, while real, are outweighed by the public’s interest in the materials and the government’s obligation under the Freedom of Information Act to promote transparency.
“We defeated both the Biden-led Justice Department and his high-price private attorneys,” the Oversight Project said in a July 27 statement. “These tapes we are releasing today should have come out a long time ago.”
Oversight Project release politically motivated, Biden spokesman says
The recordings stem from interviews Biden gave in 2017 to Zwonitzer for his memoir about the death of his son, Beau Biden. The Department of Justice obtained the materials during Special Counsel Robert Hur’s 2023 investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents.
Hur ultimately declined to bring charges against Biden in February 2024, but said the former president had shared classified materials in the context of those conversations. Hur said he thought a jury would find Biden to be a sympathetic figure because of his age, 74 at the time, and what Hur has described as having a “poor memory.”
Longtime Biden spokesman TJ Ducklo did not immediately respond to a USA TODAY request for comment but told the Associated Press that the Oversight Project’s release of the materials was 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,” Ducklo said. “Reversing course and making them public is just the latest example of this Administration weaponizing the DOJ for political retribution.”
Biden shares details on 2016 race decision
The audio also details Biden meeting with Obama and advising on whether he should run for president in 2016.
“He said it’s my decision to run or not. It doesn’t have to do with the field,” Biden recalled.
Biden noted that Obama questioned whether he could win the Democratic nomination over Hillary Clinton, with Obama telling him that it would “really be an uphill battle.”
“The fact is that he didn’t think it was doable at that time, that I could, that I could actually go out and get the nomination,” Biden said. “That was my read at the time.”
Biden ultimately did not run for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, deciding to hold off until 2020.
It’s unclear when the meeting between Biden and Obama took place, but Biden shared details with his ghostwriter just days before the 2016 presidential election.
During another meeting with the ghostwriter, Biden said one of his advisers told him he had a unique advantage over the 2016 Democratic presidential candidates, including Clinton, the eventual nominee, and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders: “You have the ability to be a unifier, a reassuring skill. Hillary is divisive and Bernie is too angry.”
Biden also discussed with aides what some of his challenges as a candidate would be. One aide had mentioned his frequent public gaffes.
“Gaffe issue, is like a virus,” Biden said. “It’s dormant, when you make a mistake again, they’ll bring it up.”
Oversight Project President Mike Howell said in a statement that the materials prove that Biden was in decline, with “so many pauses and ums” that it sounds like Biden “is buffering like a dial-up Internet connection.”
USA TODAY’s Anthony Thompson contributed