Democrats called Robert Hur’s description of Joe Biden “gratuitous.” Newly released recordings suggest the special counsel was onto something.
About 70 hours of Biden’s conversations with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer reveal repeated memory lapses, long pauses and confusion over names and dates years before Biden entered the White House.
The recordings also capture Biden discussing sensitive material while working on his 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.”
“Some of this may be classified, so be careful,” Biden told Zwonitzer in one exchange, according to CBS News.
In another, Biden said he had “just found all the classified stuff downstairs” before discussing a memo he wrote to President Barack Obama opposing a troop increase in Afghanistan. The sensitive portions were redacted from the public release.
The tapes handed a brutal reality check to Democrats who attacked Hur after his 2024 classified-documents report described Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Then-Vice President Kamala Harris called Hur’s report “inaccurate and inappropriate.”
“The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts,” Harris said at the time.
She also branded the report “clearly politically motivated, gratuitous.”
The audio tells a different story.
During an April 2017 conversation, Biden struggled to remember the names of two economic advisers.
“I’ll think of his name,” Biden said. “I should write the names down because I keep forgetting them.”
A long pause followed before Zwonitzer supplied former White House economic adviser Alan Krueger’s name.
Biden also had trouble recalling the name of a fallen service member and the date of a memorial service.
“I think I went to that memorial service in Wilmington,” Biden said before stumbling through the details. “I know what this means. Memorial service. [Redacted] gets names really f—ed up.”
Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., previously accused Hur of going “completely out of his way to editorialize.”
Former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann called Hur’s discussion of Biden’s memory “irrelevant” and “gratuitous.” Biden spokesman Ian Sams used the same word while suggesting Hur felt pressure to criticize a president he declined to prosecute.
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Hur, a former Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, to lead the investigation. Hur found evidence that Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified information but concluded the evidence was insufficient to prove criminal charges beyond a reasonable doubt.
The Oversight Project, a conservative watchdog connected to the Heritage Foundation, obtained and released the recordings after a public-records fight. Biden dropped his lawsuit seeking to block their disclosure after losing at the appeals-court level, The Associated Press reported.
Biden’s defenders insisted Hur smeared him. Two years later, the tape is doing the talking.
Listen to excerpts below:
In 2016 and 2017, Joe Biden sat down with a ghostwriter to draft his memoir “Promise Me, Dad.”
Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained these tapes in his investigation of whether Joe Biden mishandled classified information, and released a report stating that Biden read classified… pic.twitter.com/yJ1kyOdjUU
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) July 27, 2026
