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New Biden Tapes Reveal Hur's "Well-Meaning Elderly Man" Had An $8 Million Motive To Keep Classified Docs

Tyler Durden's Photo
by Tyler Durden
Authored...

Joe Biden kept classified material after leaving the vice presidency, knew what it was, and read it aloud to a civilian with no security clearance who was helping him write a book he was paid $8 million for. He said as much on tape, repeatedly, in 2016 and 2017. The Justice Department had those recordings and kept them from the public for two years - the same two years it was prosecuting Donald Trump for mishandling classified documents.

Former President Joe Biden speaks during the National Bar Association's 100th Annual Awards Gala in Chicago on July 31, 2025. Nam Y. Huh/AP Photo

The recordings came out Monday night, released by the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project after a FOIA fight that began in March 2024 and ran first against the Justice Department and then against Biden's personal attorneys. Roughly three hours of audio and 117 pages of transcripts, drawn from the interviews Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained during his investigation into Biden's handling of classified material. The Oversight Project says the complete set runs to about 70 hours and that further releases are coming.

Start with what is on them.

In an October 2016 session, recorded while he was still the sitting vice president, Biden tells ghostwriter Mark Lewis Zwonitzer: "I have extensive notes over this period of time... They didn't even know I had this."

In February 2017, a month after leaving office and living in a Virginia rental: "So this was - I, early on, in '09 - I just found all of the classified stuff downstairs." He then walks Zwonitzer through his 2009 argument against the Afghanistan troop surge.

On April 14, 2017, he stops to warn the man he's talking to: "Some of this may be classified. So, be careful. I'm not sure. ... It's not marked classified, but -"

Elsewhere in the same period: "The next thing I have here is, um, this is classified."

Hur's report found that Biden read from classified notebooks to Zwonitzer "nearly verbatim, sometimes for an hour or more at a time" on at least three occasions, and that the evidence showed convincingly he knew those notebooks held classified information. The FBI later recovered marked classified documents on Afghanistan policy, along with the notebooks, from the garages, offices and basement den of Biden's Wilmington home.

The transcripts are shot through with redactions. The Oversight Project's argument is that the blackouts are themselves the evidence: "The silence of the redactions loudly demonstrates that Biden knowingly and willfully disclosed classified information to his ghostwriter." Nine years on, the public still isn't cleared to know what he told a man who wasn't cleared to hear it.

The Justice Department Had The Tapes The Whole Time

In June 2023, the Department of Justice indicted Donald Trump on dozens of counts for retaining classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Espionage Act charges, a special counsel, a grand jury, federal agents inside a former president's home, and a year of argument over whether a man who kept boxes in a bathroom endangered the country.

Through every month of that, the same Department held audio of the sitting president saying he'd found all the classified stuff downstairs. It had obtained the recordings through Hur's investigation, knew their contents in detail, and declined to release them for the remainder of Biden's term.

When Biden's own interview with Hur finally surfaced in May 2025, the Department didn't relent - Axios obtained the five hours of audio and published it.

The ghostwriter tapes took another fourteen months. Once Biden left office and no longer had a department asserting exemptions on his behalf, his private attorneys sued in May 2026 to keep them sealed, arguing the conversations were personal. A federal judge in Washington ruled against him in June. A three-judge panel of the DC Circuit then rejected his appeal 2-1, finding a substantial public interest in disclosure.

He had two moves left - rehearing before the full circuit, or a petition to the Supreme Court - and took neither. His spokesman announced that Biden "respects the courts and the vital role an independent judiciary plays in a healthy democracy," in the same week he stopped resisting one.

The Ghostwriter Deleted The Recordings Before The FBI Called

The tapes came close to never existing at all. Chapter Seventeen of Hur's report deals with what Zwonitzer did after learning a special counsel had been appointed to investigate Biden. Before the FBI made contact, he deleted the audio files of his Biden interviews from his laptop and from an external hard drive. He described it to investigators plainly: "I simply took the audio files subfolder from both the G drive and my laptop and slid them into the trash. I saved all the transcripts."

Hur's own assessment of what had been destroyed was that the recordings "had significant evidentiary value."

Bureau technicians recovered most of the audio from the external drive, and nothing relevant from the laptop. Three of the recovered files were missing portions. A fourth had been partly overwritten by a different recording. Zwonitzer told investigators he'd been worried about being hacked, and declined to say how much of his motivation was the federal investigation he had just learned about. He wasn't charged - as Hur cited insufficient evidence and found him cooperative and forthright, which he was, after the deletion.

Hur Gave Two Different Answers Five Weeks Apart

In addition to pulling a Comey ('no reasonable prosecutor' vibes), Hur was quite the spin doctor. 

In February 2024, Hur wrote that a jury would likely see Biden as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory," and that convicting a former president in his eighties of a felony requiring willfulness would be difficult. It was the only line most people retained from a 345-page report. Biden's own lawyers spent the following week attacking it as gratuitous, and it followed him into every press conference until he left the 2024 race.

Five weeks later, on March 12, 2024, Hur sat before the House Judiciary Committee under oath and was asked why Biden had taken the notebooks in the first place. His answer pointed at money. Biden had "strong motivations to ignore proper procedures for safeguarding his classified" material, Hur testified, and the likely reason he wanted the notebooks was the $8 million three-book deal he'd signed with Flatiron Books in April 2017, reported by Publishers Weekly and covering two books by Biden and one by Jill Biden.

Those two accounts describe different men. One is confused and harmless. The other is a former vice president with a financial motivation to hold onto national security material and a ghostwriter waiting to hear it. 

The financial record sits in public filings. The Bidens reported adjusted gross income of $396,456 in 2016, his last full year as vice president, and $11,031,309 in 2017. Promise Me, Dad sold more than 300,000 copies, and Biden took in roughly $1.8 million from thirty book-tour appearances. When Hur's investigators later asked him about the recordings, his written answers maintained that he'd used the word "classified" only loosely around his ghostwriter.

Bottom line: Hur found evidence of disclosure - spoken aloud, to a civilian without clearance, in service of a book contract that Hur himself identified as the motive. Disclosure is what the Espionage Act was written to reach, and the man who did it was never charged, never tried, and never had to sit in a courtroom while a jury listened to the recording.

In February 2025, Trump revoked Biden's security clearances and daily intelligence briefings, citing the special counsel directly: "The Hur Report revealed that Biden suffers from 'poor memory' and, even in his 'prime,' could not be trusted with sensitive information."

Meanwhile, about 67 hours of audio have yet to be released.

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