The Department of Justice (DOJ) informed a federal judge on Monday that it indeed possesses transcripts of President Joe Biden’s conversations with his biographer regarding the classified documents investigation into the president, contradicting its statement last month that it did not have such records. The revelation, perhaps unsurprisingly, comes after Biden announced he was dropping his reelection bid.
“The DOJ filed a court document in which it says that it found transcripts of taped conversations between Biden and biographer Mark Zwonitzer, with whom Biden shared classified information, as part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) battle with the Heritage Foundation over access to materials from special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation of the president,” The Daily Caller reported.
“DOJ’s disclosure that it does have transcripts of Biden talking with Zwonitzer contradicts its June assertion in court that “we don’t have some transcript that’s been created by the special counsel” and comes the day after Biden decided to quit the 2024 presidential race, the outlet added.
In recent days, the Department of Justice (DOJ) found that Hur’s office had indeed compiled transcripts for several of Biden’s discussions with Zwonitzer. These talks took place during the time the writer was engaged in working on Biden’s memoirs, which were published in 2007 and 2017, as reported by Politico. Previously, the Justice Department had maintained that reviewing dozens of hours of taped conversations containing classified material was significantly more challenging and time-consuming than the task of sifting through written documents.
“In the past few days…the Department located six electronic files, consisting of a total of 117 pages, that appeared to be verbatim transcripts of a small subset of the Biden-Zwonitzer audio recordings created for the SCO by a court-reporting service,” DOJ Attorney Cameron Silverberg wrote in the Monday court filing. He is the same DOJ attorney who said in court on June 18 that “we don’t have some transcript that’s been created by the special counsel that we can attest to its accuracy,” per Politico.
Since the release of Hur’s report in February, detailing Biden’s mishandling of classified documents and concluding that the president should not face charges due to being perceived as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” by a jury, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has been inundated with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from news outlets and conservative organizations.
These requests have been in response to the DOJ’s decision not to release the audio recordings of Biden’s October 2023 interviews with Hur, despite the public release of transcripts. These transcripts reveal that the president appeared to forget which years he served as vice president and the year his eldest son passed away.
Democrats and Biden allies criticized Hur and his report, arguing that the discussion on the president’s mental acuity was unnecessary and that Hur was politically motivated, aiming to discredit Biden with just nine months remaining until Election Day.
In response, Biden announced his withdrawal from the presidential race Sunday, succumbing to intense internal pressure from fellow Democrats concerned that the American public might view him as too weak to secure a victory, especially after his poor showing in the presidential debate late June.
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