By Douglas V. Gibbs
Joe Biden’s legal battle to suppress audio recordings from his 2016-2017 ghostwriter sessions has finally ended, and the revelations are damning. Roughly 70 hours of audio and over 100 pages of transcripts have been released after a federal judge dissolved an injunction blocking their publication. The recordings, made while Biden worked with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer on his memoir “Promise Me, Dad,” contain multiple instances of Biden acknowledging he was handling classified information and even sharing it with his unauthorized ghostwriter.
“I just found all the classified stuff downstairs,” Biden is heard saying in one February 2017 recording. In another, he warns, “The next thing I have here is, um, this is classified.” Perhaps most incriminatingly, Biden explicitly states, “Some of this may be classified. So, be careful. I’m not sure. … It’s not marked classified, but…” These acknowledgments directly contradict any claims of inadvertent mishandling, and Biden at one point boasted officials never knew he had them. Some of these sensitive records were found by investigators in his garage, offices, and basement den.
Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained the recordings during his investigation into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, but declined to prosecute, saying a jury would view Biden with sympathy because he was a “well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” And, realize, these recordings took place seven years before Special Counsel Hur made that conclusion.
The Oversight Project, which obtained the recordings through a Freedom of Information Act request after years of legal battles, noted that “the silence of the redactions loudly demonstrates that Biden knowingly and willfully disclosed classified information to his ghostwriter.” The extent of these disclosures was apparently far greater than Special Counsel Robert Hur previously indicated in his investigation.
Perhaps equally concerning are the multiple instances of cognitive lapses captured in the recordings – years before Biden launched his 2020 presidential campaign. At various points, Biden struggles to remember details, loses his train of thought, and requires assistance from his ghostwriter to reconstruct past events. Biden was unfit for office, and these tapes reveal that. The Democratic Party was corrupt about Biden before, during, and since his presidency and did everything they could to cover it up. And then, they targeted Trump, and raided Mar-a-Lago.
The hypocrisy of the Justice Department’s handling of classified document cases is glaring. While Jack Smith aggressively pursued Donald Trump for similar allegations with no evidence, the department initially protected Biden by fighting to keep these recordings sealed. The release comes only after Biden dropped his legal challenges following unfavorable court rulings.
The tapes also raise serious questions about why Special Counsel Hur declined to prosecute despite evidence of willful mishandling of classified information. Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice released a sanitized version of these transcripts in 2024, but the actually audio was never handed over. And now that they are available, they reveal that Joe Biden was untruthful, mentally imbalanced, and they serve as an indictment against the deep state that protected him.
These recordings now face full congressional scrutiny, and Congress must confront the evidence they contain: that a former vice president and future president knowingly disclosed classified information to an unauthorized individual and demonstrated cognitive impairment years before his presidential campaign. The American public deserves answers about how someone with these documented issues was allowed to ascend to the presidency, and who participated in concealing this information from voters.
The Biden administration’s attempts to frame this as “weaponizing the DOJ for political retribution” ring hollow when confronted with Biden’s own words acknowledging the classified nature of the materials he was sharing. These tapes represent not just a breach of national security protocols but a profound betrayal of public trust that demands accountability from all involved.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
