Listen: Full Biden-Hur Special Counsel Interview

Update:

Full Biden-Hur special counsel interview

Original post:

Audio of former President Joe Biden‘s October 2023 interview with special counsel Robert Hur was leaked Friday, revealing more insight into the ex-president’s memory lapses about important information.

During the interview Hur conducted for the investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents, Biden struggled to remember key dates, including when his son Beau Biden died and when President Donald Trump was first elected, and he trailed off topic when recalling past memories.

The audio recordings were published by Axios on Friday. However, transcripts of the interviews were made public just weeks after Hur’s report came out early last year. The audio provides a deeper look into how Biden struggled through his interviews with Hur, in which his lawyers had to assist the then-president in remembering key dates and keeping him on topic.

Biden said his son, who died of brain cancer in 2015, died in 2017 or 2018. He also said that Trump was elected in 2017, but he was corrected by one of his lawyers, who said it was 2016.

Biden then trailed off as he recounted his memoir, Promise Me, Dad.

Biden’s lawyer at one point offered to give him a break, but the then-president refused, saying he wanted to “get it done.”

Key moments from the interviews include moments when Biden:

Struggles to find the right words and dates when recounting the time of his son Beau's death

Describes trip to Mongolia on tangent when asked about classified documents

Acknowledges he might have wanted to keep classified document "just for posterity's sake"

Gives inconsistent answer on whether he gave instructions on where to find classified documents in his home

Jokes "I'm a young man" at outset of the interviews

“The transcripts were released by the Biden administration more than a year ago,” Scully said. “The audio does nothing but confirm what is already public.”

White House director of rapid response Jake Schneider reacted to the leak in a post on X.

“We tried to tell you,” he wrote. “We literally spent years trying to tell you. Please stop acting shocked that Biden was senile, incompetent, and unfit for office.”

Republican lawmakers pressed former Attorney General Merrick Garland to release the audio tapes last year, but every House Democrat voted against it.

The National Republican Congressional Committee slammed Democrats for hiding Biden’s condition in an X post.

“Democrats hid the truth from the American people—Biden was unfit to remain President. They must answer for their lock step cover up,” the NRCC posted.

NRCC Deputy Executive Director Jack Pandol said every Democrat who voted against the release of the tapes is “complicit in the cover up of the century” in an X post.

Trump told reporters Friday that he was leaving it up to Attorney General Pam Bondi as to whether the government would release the tapes.

“Look, everybody understands the condition of him,” Trump said. “I know people that are 89, 90, 92, 93 years old and are literally perfect. But Joe was not one of them, and they did a lot of hiding. They were, they were really playing games. And, you know, you can’t do that. Our country’s at stake.”

Alex Thompson, who co-authored the article on the audio leak, also co-authored the book Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

The book, which is scheduled to be released May 20, includes more than 200 conversations with Democrats about how the White House shielded the deterioration of Biden’s mental health.