Amid long, uncomfortable pauses, Joe Biden struggled to recall when his son died, when he left office as vice president, what year Donald Trump was elected or why he had classified documents he shouldn’t have had, according to audio Axios obtained of his October 2023 interviews with special counsel Robert Hur.
Why it matters: The newly released recordings of Biden having trouble recalling such details — while occasionally slurring words and muttering — shed light on why his White House refused to release the recordings last year, as questions mounted about his mental acuity.
- The audio also appears to validate Hur’s assertion that jurors in a trial likely would have viewed Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
- Partly based on that determination, Hur decided not to prosecute Biden for improper possession of classified documents, angering Republicans because Trump was facing charges in his own classified document scandal then.
- Democrats and Biden’s White House blasted Hur for his observations about Biden. They repeatedly insisted he was “sharp” and that Hur was politically motivated. But the audio from the six hours of interviews indicates he and co-counsel Marc Krickbaum were respectful and friendly.
The big picture: The audio surfaces as Democrats and the national media are grappling with the legacy of Biden’s White House and campaign hiding his decline as he ran for another four-year term at age 81.
- Democratic leaders have struggled this week to respond to reports about a new book on that topic — “Original Sin,” by Axios’ Alex Thompson and CNN’s Jake Tapper — that will be released Tuesday.
- The audio — from two three-hour sessions on Oct. 8 and 9, 2023 — adds voice and dimension to the transcripts of the interviews that the Justice Department made available in the weeksafter Hur’s report was released Feb. 8, 2024.
- Biden’s White House refused to release the recordings last year, arguing they were protected “law enforcement materials” and that Republicans only wanted “to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes.”
Between the lines: The audio shows what the transcript lacks — the president’s dry-whisper voice and the long silences as he struggles to find the right words or dates. Those often were supplied by his attorneys, who acted as caretakers of his memory.
- The attorneys had to remind Biden the year his son Beau died (2015) and when Trump was first elected (2016).
- Also captured on the audio: the tick-tock of a grandfather clock in the White House’s Map Room, where the interviews took place. It adds a metronomic measurement of Biden’s halting speech — especially as he describes his book, Promise Me, Dad, about Beau’s death from brain cancer at 46.
This is how that part of the interview is recounted in the transcript: Biden says, “OK, yeah. In 2017, Beau had passed and — this is personal — the genesis of the book and the title Promise Me, Dad, was a — I know you’re all close with your sons and daughters, but Beau was like my right arm and Hunt was my left.”
…
Reality check: While Biden had clear memory lapses and needed assistance at times (with words such as “fax machine” and “poster board”), overall he was engaged in the interview.
- He cracked jokes and made humorous asides, and was able to respond to the general gist of the questions. But he had little memory of how he came to have classified documents after he left office as vice president.
- On Oct. 8 — the first day of the interview and the day after Hamas’ attack on Israel — Biden often was slow and forgetful of basic facts.
- That day, it took Hur more than two hours to clearly determine how the documents could have ended up in various personal desks and file cabinets after Biden left office. That was because Biden kept veering into other subjects.
- On Oct. 9, however, Biden sounded much more engaged and vigorous.
Zoom in: Throughout his testimony, Biden sounded more like a nostalgic, grandfatherly storyteller than a potential defendant who could be accused of hoarding secret papers. He waxed on about:
- How then-President Obama in 2016 didn’t want Biden to run for president out of the belief that Hillary Clinton “had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did.“
- The walnut wood and seven different kinds of molding in refurbished rooms of his home.
- The Corvette he drove with comedian Jay Leno.
- The technological influence Gutenberg’s printing press had on Europe.
- The visual impact of Richard Nixon sweating on TV during his 1960 debate with John Kennedy.
- And the time he shot a bow and arrow in Mongolia.
“Am I making any sense to you?” Biden asked at one point while discussing the classification process for sensitive documents.
Though amiable, the interview became somewhat tense when Biden attorney Bob Bauer chastised prosecutor Krickbaum for leading Biden to consider changing his story about why he kept a classified document about Afghanistan.
- “Your answer is that you don’t know,” Bauer instructed the president at one point.
- But then Krickbaum noted that journalists had written about the document, and he asked if Biden intended to keep it because of its historical value.
- “I guess I wanted to hang onto it just for posterity’s sake,” Biden acknowledged.
That admission of intent technically could have exposed Biden to criminal charges, and Bauer soon interjected:”I just really would like to avoid, for the purpose of a clean record, getting into speculative areas.… He does not recall specifically intending to keep this memo after he left the vice presidency.”
- Krickbaum then called for a break.
In another instance, Krickbaum noted that DOJ had a copy of a recording made by Mark Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter of Promise Me, Dad, whom Biden told in 2017, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”
- “So you can imagine we are curious what you meant when you said, ‘I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.’ ” Krickbaum told Biden.
- “I don’t remember,” Biden responded. “And I’m not supposed to speculate, right?
- “Correct,” said Bauer, Biden’s attorney.
- “So — OK, well, I don’t remember and it may have been — I just don’t remember,” Biden said.
- White House counsel Ed Siskel and his deputy, Rachel Cotton, also stepped in occasionally when the then-president was searching for words or dates.
Zoom out: Hur’s report concluded that this evidence wasn’t enough to persuade a jury to convict Biden — especially given how cooperative Biden had been (unlike Trump in his case) and how likable and forgetful Biden was.
- “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president, well into his 80s — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” Hur concluded.
- Trump’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., promptly accused Biden of being unfit to be president if he weren’t fit enough for trial.
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Greg Gutfeld on the Joe Biden Mental Decline Scandal: ‘This Makes Watergate Look Like a Parking Ticket’
“While they were saying Trump was a threat to democracy, they had an incapacitated president that they were covering up for…the 25th amendment clearly should have been invoked…”
On The Five of FOX News this week, Greg Gutfeld suggested that the Joe Biden mental decline scandal is worse than Watergate. On one hand, he is making fun of the tendency of the left to claim everything Trump does is worse than Watergate, but at the same time he is being serious.
Greg pointed out that Democrats and the media are scrambling to distance themselves from the controversy and move on, but says that we can’t move on and we cannot allow them to move on either. There must be a reckoning.
Gutfeld makes some other points about the scandal, noting that it was a national security risk as well.
Partial transcript via Real Clear Politics:
GUTFELD: It is — this makes Watergate look like a parking ticket. We don’t need to move forward. We have to move backwards. There was this other tidbit, cabinet members believe the president could not be relied on to respond to a crisis at night.
PERINO: Yes.
GUTFELD: That means when Biden was president, he was pure 25th Amendment material. How do we know this? We found out on May 15, 2025 a year or two, maybe longer after the fact. So, this book isn’t telling on Joe. Joe is pathetic and sad. It’s telling on itself, you know. When does information become so urgent that you don’t save it for your stupid book?
If this were Trump, if any of this information were about Trump, they wouldn’t have saved it for a book because they — remember, while this was happening, Trump wasn’t even president and they were saying he was an existential risk. He was a threat to democracy. While they were saying Trump was a threat to democracy, they had an incapacitated president that they were covering up for. This is — I mean, it’s insane.
This story is so big that I believe the books are designed just kind of let the air out of it and just like let’s get past this. We can’t — we can’t let them do this. We can’t. This is a — this is a huge deal. We were lied to.
This video is cued to start at the 2:50 mark, so just press play:
This is far from over. Especially now that the Hur interview audio is starting to leak. We need congressional hearings.
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