The Department of Justice (DOJ) told a federal judge on Monday that it does have transcripts of President Joe Biden’s discussions with his biographer from the classified documents probe into the president after saying last month that it did not.
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. 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 DOJ discovered “in the past few days” that Hur’s office did have transcripts put together for some of Biden’s talks with Zwonitzer, which occurred while the writer was working on Biden memoirs published in 2007 and 2017, accordingto Politico. The Justice Department had previously asserted that reviewing dozens of hours of taped conversations for classified material is a far more difficult and time-consuming task than combing through written materials.
Biographer Tapes Filing by Nick Pope on Scribd
“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.
Silverberg 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.
The DOJ has been bombarded by FOIA requests from news outlets and conservative organizations since Hur released his report on Biden’s mishandling of classified documents in February, which concluded that the president should not be charged for wrongdoing in part because he would be perceived by a jury as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Subsequently, the DOJ has not released the audio recordings of Biden’s October 2023 interviews with Hur to complement transcripts that have been released publicly and show that the president appeared to forget which years he was vice president and the year in which his eldest son passed away.
Democrats and Biden allies excoriated Hur and his report, asserting that language about the president’s mental acuity was gratuitous and that Hur was a partisan looking to undermine Biden with about nine months to go until Election Day. Biden quit the presidential race Sunday following a massive internal pressure campaign from other Democrats who worried that the American public may permanently perceive Biden to be too frail to win an election following his terribleperformance at the presidential debate in late June.
The DOJ did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
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