Audio recordings that Joe Biden fought for years to keep private – in which he acknowledges possessing classified material after leaving office as US vice-president – have been released by Republicans in Congress.
The tapes contain interviews between Biden, now 83, and a ghostwriter working on his 2017 memoir, which was titled Promise Me, Dad.
“I just found all the classified stuff downstairs,” Biden is heard saying at one point in the audio, recorded in February 2017, a month after he left the White House.
A US Department of Justice (DOJ) special counsel found in 2024 that Biden had improperly retained records but did not recommend charging him.
House Republicans and a conservative nonprofit, the Oversight Project, sued for the tapes as part of that probe into Biden’s handling of the records.
Responding to the release of the tapes, Biden’s spokesman TJ Ducklo criticised the direction of the justice department under President Donald Trump – saying the move was “just the latest example of this Administration weaponizing the DOJ for political retribution”.
“It’s wrong, and while President Biden disagrees with today’s decision, he also respects the courts and the vital role an independent judiciary plays in a healthy democracy,” Ducklo added.
The audio was recorded during the drafting of the 2017 memoir that Biden penned with co-writer Mark Zwonitzer.
At one point in the more than two hours of tapes released on Monday, Biden tells the ghostwriter: “The next thing I have here is, um, this is classified.”
In an October 2016 recording, he tells Zwonitzer: “I have extensive notes over this period of time… They [the White House] didn’t know I have this.”
At the time, Biden was still serving as vice-president to Barack Obama.
During Biden’s tenure as president from 2021-25, the justice department declined to release the audio tapes.
In May, his personal lawyers sued the justice department in an effort to keep the tapes private, but after legal defeats they dropped their lawsuit.
The recordings contain significant redactions, which Republicans on the House Oversight Committee say “are intended to cover [Biden’s] disclosure of classified information”.
The recordings and transcripts were obtained by Special Counsel Robert Hur during his investigation in 2024 into Biden’s handling of classified documents.
Explaining his decision not recommend charges, Hur said he had concerns that a jury would take Biden’s side and view him as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.
Trump was charged with illegally retaining the documents at his home in Florida, but the charges were dropped after he returned to the White House.
