
In February 2017, Joe Biden sat down with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer to record sessions for his memoir and casually mentioned that he'd found classified documents in his Delaware home. "I just found all the classified stuff downstairs," Biden said on the recording. On another tape, he added: "Some of this may be classified, so be careful... I'm not sure."
Those recordings are now public. And they sound exactly as bad as Special Counsel Robert Hur said they were.
The audio was released on July 27 after the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 on July 21, 2026, in favor of the Heritage Foundation, which had filed a FOIA request to obtain the tapes. Biden's legal team fought the release for months. Now we know why.
The memoir sessions, recorded during 2016 and 2017, captured Biden discussing national security matters with a civilian writer who had no security clearance. Biden wasn't president at the time. He wasn't vice president anymore either. He was a private citizen sitting on classified Afghanistan documents in his Delaware garage — and talking about them on tape.
CNN legal analyst Elie Honig, a former assistant U.S. Attorney, didn't mince words about what the tapes reveal. "He's ON TAPE — after he's out of the vice presidency — saying to his autobiographer, 'the classified documents are in the basement.' He knew it!" Honig said. He went further: "Biden knew he had highly classified documents in his home, kept them for a reason, and held on to them for years."
Special Counsel Hur was appointed in early January 2023 after FBI agents discovered classified documents in Biden's Delaware garage in 2022. Hur's investigation produced a report that declined to recommend charges — not because the evidence was weak, but because Hur described Biden as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" whom no jury would convict. The DOJ took that recommendation and closed the book.
Meanwhile, Zwonitzer told investigators he deleted recordings after Hur's appointment because he was "afraid of being hacked." A ghostwriter who happened to destroy evidence right after a special counsel showed up. Convenient timing for a man worried about hackers and not, say, federal prosecutors.
When classified documents turned up at Mar-a-Lago, we got a raid, a grand jury, a 37-count indictment, and wall-to-wall cable coverage. When classified documents turned up in Biden's garage — next to his Corvette, as he helpfully reminded us — we got a special counsel report that read like a doctor's note excusing a patient from gym class.
The tapes don't reveal anything Hur didn't already tell us. They just put it in Biden's own voice, on the record, impossible to spin as a misunderstanding or a Republican talking point. He knew he had the documents. He talked about them with someone who had no clearance. And the Department of Justice decided that was fine.


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