The Biden Tapes Have FINALLY Been Released. What Do They Say?

Joe Biden fought like hell to keep a set of audio recordings with his ghostwriter locked away.

He lost.

After a two-year legal battle, those tapes are now public, reviving questions about Biden's handling of classified information and raising fresh questions about his cognitive decline. The recordings run roughly 70 hours long, so there’s a lot to go over.

Special Counsel Robert Hur cited these very recordings in his February 2024 report on Biden's handling of classified documents, which detailed how Biden kept volumes of notes at his home, some of it classified material he had no business holding onto. Biden made the tapes while working with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer on his 2017 memoir Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose. While the classified material never made it into the published book, the sharing of classified material is the issue here.

When the Hur report dropped, Biden told reporters, "I did not share classified information. I did not share it with my ghostwriter," claiming he had no idea how boxes of classified documents ended up in his garage.

The tapes tell a different story.

"Some of this may be classified … So, be careful. I'm not sure ... It's not marked classified but…” Biden told Zwonitzer on tape. Moments later, Biden said, "The next thing I have here is, um, this is classified …"

So Biden not only shared classified information, but he also knew he was doing so.

Hur's investigation began after classified documents dating to Biden's vice presidency turned up in his home and private office. He declined to recommend charges, but his report described a man "struggling to remember events," exhibiting "diminished faculties," with conversations that were "painfully slow" as early as 2016.

Biden's halting delivery on the tapes backs that up. At one point he trails off entirely, saying, "All right — what was I going to ask you? Something else … Uh … um. Oh gosh. I can't think of anything else."

The tapes are now public because the Oversight Project, a conservative nonprofit devoted to rooting out government corruption, refused to let Biden's team bury them.

In an Oct. 10, 2016 recording, Biden told Zwonitzer he had notes the White House didn't even know about, saying, "I have extensive notes over this period of time … They didn't know I have this." A Feb. 16, 2017 recording, made a month after Biden left the vice presidency, is worse. "I just found all the classified stuff downstairs," Biden said, a remark Hur cited as proof of classified material sitting in Biden's Virginia rental home, calling his tone "matter-of-fact."

Hur decided a jury would never convict Biden, predicting jurors would see "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." Those same "diminished faculties and faulty memory," Hur wrote, showed up again in Biden's 2023 interview with investigators, audio the Justice Department released last year, in which Biden struggled to recall the year his son Beau died and the year Trump first won the presidency.

The ironic thing is that Biden had plenty to say about Trump's own classified documents problem at Mar-a-Lago, calling it "totally irresponsible" on 60 Minutes. A separate special counsel charged Trump over that case, though prosecutors later dropped the case.

Jeff Clark, the Oversight Project's vice president of litigation, told CBS News the department only cooperated after President Trump took office. Biden's own attorneys blocked release until a federal appeals court ruled against him on July 20. The Oversight Project called it a "complete and total victory" and posted the tapes on YouTube.

Oh, let’s go ahead and crowd source YOUR reactions to the Biden-Zwonitzer tapes. They are now all here:https://t.co/MpSPWZW1Ic
— Jeff Clark (@JeffClarkUS) July 27, 2026

Biden fought to keep the American public from hearing these recordings, and now that the tapes are finally out, it's easy to understand why.

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