"Some of this may be classified," Joe Biden told his ghostwriter in a recorded February 2017 session. "So, be careful. I'm not sure."
He was sure enough to keep showing him the documents.
The long-suppressed audio recordings between former President Biden and memoir ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer were released Sunday after a years-long legal battle to keep them buried. Over two and a half hours of tape, originally cited in Special Counsel Robert Hur's 2024 report on Biden's mishandling of classified materials, are now public — and the content is exactly as bad as Biden's attorneys feared it would be.
The recordings were made during sessions for Biden's 2017 book "Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose." In them, Biden is heard casually referencing classified material from his time as vice president while flipping through personal notes he'd kept at his Delaware home. At one point, he tells Zwonitzer: "I just found all the classified stuff downstairs." At another: "The next thing I have here is classified." He even reportedly said, "They didn't even know I had this," while showing the ghostwriter old notes on foreign policy matters.
These aren't ambiguous snippets taken out of context. These are a former vice president, on tape, acknowledging he possessed classified information outside of secure facilities — and sharing references to it with someone who had no security clearance whatsoever.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 on July 21 that the tapes should be released, siding with the Heritage Foundation's Freedom of Information Act request. Biden's own lawyers had fought the disclosure for years, joining the legal case to prevent the public from ever hearing what was on them. By July 24, they gave up and dropped their challenge entirely. A judge accepted the dismissal Monday, and the audio went public the same day.
CNN legal analyst Elie Honig — not exactly a card-carrying member of the MAGA caucus — didn't mince words. "He's ON TAPE — after he's out of the vice presidency — saying to his autobiographer, 'the classified documents are in the basement.' He knew it!" Honig said. He added: "Biden knew he had highly classified documents in his home, kept them for a reason, and held on to them for years."
That's CNN saying that. Not Newsmax. Not talk radio. CNN.
There's also the matter of what Zwonitzer did after Special Counsel Hur was appointed in early January 2023. According to investigators, the ghostwriter attempted to delete the recordings in July 2023, citing concerns about hacking. Hur's report also referenced classified documents about Afghanistan found in Biden's Delaware garage in 2022 — the same garage where the corvette lived, the one Biden assured us was locked.
Remember that February 2024 press conference? The one where Biden marched to the podium to insist his memory was fine and his handling of classified materials was entirely proper? The tapes tell a different story. They show halting speech, memory struggles, and a man who knew he was sitting on classified material and kept going anyway.
The "sharp as a tack" crowd spent two years insisting these recordings were a nothingburger — a political stunt by Republicans looking for a scandal. They fought in court to keep the public from hearing a single second. The D.C. Circuit disagreed, finding that the public interest in evaluating Hur's decision not to charge Biden outweighed any privacy concerns.
So Biden wasn't charged because, as Hur concluded, a jury would see a sympathetic elderly man with memory problems. But the tapes show a man who was lucid enough to know the material was classified, deliberate enough to keep it, and comfortable enough to share references to it with his book collaborator.
Pick whichever version you prefer. Neither one is good for Joe.