A years-long legal battle over sensitive audio recordings tied to President Joe Biden has reached a new turning point, as House Republicans have publicly released tapes that Biden’s legal team repeatedly sought to keep out of the public domain. The recordings, captured during interview sessions between Biden and a ghostwriter working on his 2017 memoir *Promise Me, Dad*, contain explicit comments from the 83-year-old commander-in-chief acknowledging he retained classified government materials after his vice presidency ended in 2017.
The first of the recorded conversations dates back to October 2016, when Biden was still serving as vice president under the Obama administration. During that session, Biden told co-writer Mark Zwonitzer, “I have extensive notes over this period of time… They [the White House] didn’t know I have this.” A second recording, made in February 2017 just one month after Biden left the White House, captures him stating plainly, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” Later in the more than two hours of tapes published Monday, he again acknowledges, “The next thing I have here is, um, this is classified.”
House Republicans partnered with the conservative nonprofit Oversight Project to launch a legal battle for access to the tapes, which were originally turned over to the Department of Justice as part of a 2024 probe into Biden’s handling of classified national security records. During Biden’s presidential tenure from 2021 to 2025, the DOJ repeatedly refused to release the materials. In May of this year, Biden’s personal legal team filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice to block the release, but after a series of court losses, the team was forced to drop their legal challenge.
The released recordings remain heavily redacted, a detail that House Oversight Committee Republicans argue is intentional to hide the full scope of Biden’s disclosures of sensitive classified information. In 2024, Special Counsel Robert Hur accessed the recordings and their transcripts during his official investigation into Biden’s retention of classified documents. Hur’s final report concluded Biden had improperly held onto the government records, but the special counsel declined to recommend criminal charges. Hur cited multiple factors for the decision, including widespread concerns that a jury would perceive Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and decline to deliver a conviction.
This controversy mirrors a parallel case involving former President and now returning President Donald Trump, who faced criminal charges for illegally retaining classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Those charges were ultimately dismissed after Trump won the 2024 presidential election and returned to the White House.
In a formal statement responding to the release, Biden’s spokesperson TJ Ducklo framed the move as a partisan political attack. “Releasing the tapes was just the latest example of this Administration weaponizing the DOJ for political retribution,” Ducklo said. He added that while President Biden disagrees with the court ruling that cleared the release, “he also respects the courts and the vital role an independent judiciary plays in a healthy democracy.”