The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday released former President Biden’s interview with former special counsel Robert Hur, bringing to a close a lengthy battle to quash the audio amid broader concerns over the former president’s health.
The Justice Department has already released a transcript of Biden’s conversation with the special counsel, which shows him struggling to recall certain details but engaging at length over more than five hours of interviews.
The release of the full audio offers a greater public view of those exchanges at a time when the former president’s mental sharpness while in office has come under renewed scrutiny ahead of the release of a new book about his decision to seek reelection in 2024 and later drop out.
The audio depicts Biden’s soft speaking tone and periodic pauses as he attempted to recall specifics. The interview with the special counsel lasted more than five hours over two days from Oct. 8 to 9, 2024.
“Thank you very much for being here. We appreciate your time very much,” special counsel Robert Hur says at the outset before identifying everyone in the room.
The audio included previously revealed instances of Biden struggling to answer questions or remember dates, including the year his son Beau Biden died and the years when he served as vice president. He would pause midsentence while he searched for a word and then aides would occasionally interject to help.
Following the October 2023 interview, special counsel Robert Hur decided not to file charges after classified documents were found in Biden’s private home. He concluded there was not enough evidence to build a case that Biden intentionally took the documents, but he also said a jury would likely find him to be “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Hur’s 388-page report was politically damaging for Biden, who was still running for a second term at the time.
The Biden administration waived executive privilege over Hur’s report and the transcript of their conversation. But it resisted the release of the audio, citing fear of deepfakes.
Privately, Democrats also said they feared the tapes would have been used to attack Biden while he was still a candidate in the 2024 campaign.
The release of the audio comes a day after Biden’s personal office announced that he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer after a regular medical exam found a “small nodule” on his prostate earlier this month.
Also, on Tuesday, “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’s Alex Thompson is set to publish, which includes revelations that Biden aides considered the possibility of putting him in a wheelchair if he was reelected and that he didn’t seem to recognize actor George Clooney at a fundraiser.
Biden’s classified documents case has some parallels to the now-dismissed case filed against President Trump.
However, while both men had classified documents in their homes, Biden’s team notified the Justice Department of the matter, while Trump resisted multiple entreaties to return the documents. The documents were carted in boxes across the property, with some stored on a ballroom stage and in a bathroom.
While some of the classified material Biden retained was referenced in journals he kept from his time as president, the documents found at Mar-a-Lago included raw intelligence assessments with some of the highest classified markings.
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