Seventy hours of audio recordings and over 100 pages of transcripts from Joe Biden's 2016-2017 interviews with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer were released this weekend. In them, Biden casually references classified material he discovered "downstairs" at his Delaware home — material he acknowledged he knew was classified — while chatting with a private citizen writing his memoir "Promise Me, Dad."
No pre-dawn FBI raid. No mugshot. No cable news countdown clock.
The 117-page transcript, obtained through litigation by the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project, reveals a former vice president who not only retained classified documents after leaving office but openly discussed their contents with an unauthorized person. Biden referenced a 40-page handwritten memorandum he'd sent to President Barack Obama in 2009 arguing against troop deployment in Afghanistan, along with other sensitive national security materials that required redactions by the Department of Defense and the CIA under National Security Act provisions.
The audio itself is something else entirely. Oversight Project President Mike Howell described the recordings bluntly: "These tapes have so many pauses and 'ums' that it sounds like Biden is buffering like a dial-up Internet connection." Biden struggled to recall the names of his own associates during the interviews, at one point saying, "I'll think of his name. I should write the names down because I keep forgetting them." This was 2017 — years before he entered the Oval Office.
That detail matters. Former Special Counsel Robert Hur investigated Biden's handling of classified documents in 2023 and concluded that Biden had violated the law. Hur's reasoning for not recommending charges wasn't innocence — it was that a jury would see a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" and refuse to convict. The tapes now confirm the memory problems Special Counsel Hur cited weren't a late-onset condition. They were already on full display six whole years before Hur's interview.
The Oversight Project's statement on the redactions was pointed: "The silence of the redactions loudly demonstrates that Biden knowingly and willfully disclosed classified information to his ghostwriter." Biden also acknowledged during the sessions that he had documents still in his possession that the White House had not been aware of. The recordings contained what Just the News described as "breaks that highlighted the sharing of classified information" — portions so sensitive that multiple intelligence agencies demanded they stay blacked out.
Now, contrast this with what happened at Mar-a-Lago. President Trump — who had constitutional declassification authority as a sitting president — had Biden's FBI execute a search warrant on his private residence, got indicted by a special counsel, and spent months in court fighting federal charges over documents the executive branch had been negotiating to retrieve through normal channels. Biden was on tape handing classified content to a book writer in his basement, and Hur's office essentially said "he's too old to prosecute."
The left spent three years calling Trump a national security threat over documents. Meanwhile, Biden was sitting in Wilmington telling Mark Zwonitzer about the classified stuff he found next to the Corvette. On tape. With the recorder running.
That's not a double standard. That's two entirely separate legal systems wearing the same robe.