Former President Joe Biden is heard on newly released tapes telling a ghostwriter that he was in possession of classified material and was sharing it for his 2017 memoir for which he received an $8 million advance.
Mr. Biden read classified notes “nearly verbatim” to the writer, Mark Zwonitzer, for the book “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship and Purpose,” which was published a year after Mr. Biden’s two terms as vice president ended and he was contemplating a presidential run.
The 70 hours of recordings released by the House Judiciary Committee this week reveal Mr. Biden acknowledging some of the material, which he removed while serving as vice president and during his time in the Senate, was top secret.
“The next thing I have here is classified,” Mr. Biden is heard saying to Mr. Zwonitzer during one of their interviews.
On another recording, Mr. Biden, then the ex-vice president, told Mr. Zwonitzer, “Some of this may be classified, so be careful with it.”
Mr. Biden tells Mr. Zwonitzer in another conversation, “The next thing I have here is, um, this is classified.”
In a fourth conversation about events that took place during his second year as vice president, he tells Mr. Zwonitzer, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”
Mr. Biden also appears to reveal he held onto important documents from the White House, telling Mr. Zwonitzer, “I didn’t want to turn them in.”
House Republicans released the tapes following a yearslong legal battle with Mr. Biden, who sought to keep the audio private.
The tapes were used by then-special counsel Robert Hur in his 2024 investigation of Mr. Biden’s possession of classified documents.
The documents were discovered at Mr. Biden’s Delaware home and in an office at his Washington think tank.
Some of the material was found in a damaged box in his garage. The stash of material dated as far back as the 1980s, during his time in the Senate, which means he took the documents from a secure room in the Capitol.
Mr. Biden, at the time of the Hur interview, said he was “surprised to learn” that classified material was in his office and said he did not know what was in the documents.
After listening to the tapes, Mr. Hur noted Mr. Biden’s significant memory lapses and cited those in his decision not to charge the president, despite determining that Mr. Biden’s mishandling of the documents, which included the Obama administration’s foreign policy and military decisions regarding Afghanistan, “present serious risks to national security.”
Mr. Biden can be heard on the tapes struggling to remember things from a year or two earlier and losing track of conversations. He admits, “I’m confused” as he tries to recall events at a 2015 conference in Munich with then-Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and is heard losing his train of thought as he’s about to ask a question: “I was going to ask you something else. Uhhh. Ummm. Oh gosh. I can’t think what it is.”
While Mr. Hur declined to prosecute Mr. Biden for illegally possessing and storing the classified documents, the Justice Department, under Mr. Biden, prosecuted former President Trump for taking and storing classified information at his Mar-a-Lago home following his first term in the White House.
In an unprecedented move, the FBI raided Mr. Trump’s residence and confiscated the material in 2022. Special counsel Jack Smith in 2023 charged the ex-president with mishandling classified material. Mr. Trump, who as president had the authority to declassify documents, said he did nothing illegal.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case against Mr. Trump in 2024.
Republicans said the audio tapes from 2017 belie Mr. Biden’s claim that he had no idea about the secretive documents in his home and office.
“Biden knew he was sharing classified information with his ghostwriter,” Judiciary Committee Republicans said.
