Newly released audio tapes, disclosed by a conservative activist group, appear to show Joe Biden sharing classified information with a biographer and sometimes claiming memory lapses during interviews that occurred before his election to the presidency in 2020.
About three hours of audio and 117 pages of transcripts — with many redactions — were released by the Oversight Project, an arm of the Heritage Foundation, after Biden lost a prolonged legal fight to keep his conversations with his memoir ghostwriter, Mark Lewis Zwonitzer, private.
“They didn’t even know I had this,” Biden told Zwonitzer in October 2016, near the end of his second term as Barack Obama’s vice president, as he talked about sensitive foreign policy matters handled by the administration.
In one 2017 session, after Biden had left the West Wing and before he’d launched his own presidential campaign, he appeared to admit retaining classified information from his time as vice president.
“I just found all the classified stuff downstairs,” Biden said. “I wrote the President a handwritten 40-page memorandum arguing against deploying additional troops to Iraq — I mean, to Afghanistan on the grounds that it wouldn’t matter, that the day we left would be like the day before we arrived.”
