Long-sealed audio and written records of former President Joe Biden's private sessions with memoir collaborator Mark Zwonitzer entered the public record Monday, closing out a legal fight that ran roughly two and a half years. The Oversight Project, a watchdog group tied to the Heritage Foundation, obtained and published the material, drawn from conversations Biden held in 2016 and 2017 while drafting his memoir, "Promise Me, Dad."
The newly public material largely tracks with what special counsel Robert Hur laid out in his 2024 investigation: that Biden discussed sensitive material with his collaborator, showed noticeable trouble recalling details, and kept classified records long after leaving the vice presidency.
Ending a Standoff That Outlasted Two Full Years
The recordings were gathered as evidence during Hur's inquiry and were never intended for public release. The Heritage Foundation's push for them traces to a February 2024 records request, and getting them out took a genuine court fight rather than one clean ruling. A federal district judge first sided against Biden's privacy argument in June; when Biden appealed, a divided three-judge D.C. Circuit panel rejected his bid days later in a 2-1 vote, with one Biden-appointed judge dissenting over privacy concerns. Rather than take the fight to the Supreme Court, Biden's lawyers withdrew the suit in the final week of July, clearing the way for Monday's release.
In a session dated mid-February 2017, shortly after leaving the vice presidency, Biden can be heard telling Zwonitzer, "I just found all the classified stuff downstairs." He goes on to describe a lengthy handwritten memo he'd sent Obama arguing against sending more troops to Afghanistan. Two months later, Biden pauses mid-thought to warn, "Some of this may be classified," before continuing to describe the material anyway. Large stretches of both the audio and its transcript are blacked out or muted at exactly the points where the conversation moves toward national-security territory. None of the flagged content made it into the finished book.
A Callback to Hur's Most Cutting Line
The release effectively reopens a fight that shadowed the closing chapter of Biden's political career. Hur's original findings stopped short of recommending charges, resting partly on his belief that jurors would view Biden as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory," a line that became a lightning rod for broader doubts about Biden's fitness for office long after the report came out. Biden was 73 when the ghostwriter sessions began in October 2016, turning 74 within weeks, and was 81 when Hur's findings surfaced in February 2024. He abandoned his reelection bid later that year following a widely criticized debate performance against Donald Trump, and turned 83 last November.
Beyond the classified material, the tapes catch Biden losing his train of thought, misplacing dates, and pausing at length to gather himself. In one moment flagged by KRDO, Biden trails off entirely mid-question, murmuring, "Oh gosh, I, I can't think of what it is," before moving on. Elsewhere his recall sharpens noticeably — he describes, in real detail, repeated friction with Obama over how aggressively the administration should have gone after banks and addressed the housing crisis following the 2008 meltdown, saying the two clashed over it more than once.
Two Camps, Two Very Different Takeaways
Oversight Project litigation chief Jeff Clark cast the release as overdue accountability, saying the tapes have always belonged to the American people and that his group had simply handed them back to their rightful owner. Biden's camp saw it very differently. Spokesperson TJ Ducklo accused the current administration of weaponizing the DOJ for political retribution, arguing the sessions were personal conversations — including material touching on Biden's late son, Beau — that the Justice Department had agreed to keep sealed. The dispute revives a denial Biden made when the Hur report first broke in 2024, when he told reporters flatly that he had never shared classified material with his ghostwriter at all.
