Joe Biden kept classified material after leaving the vice presidency, knew what it was, and read it aloud to a civilian with no security clearance who was helping him write a book he was paid $8 million for. He said as much on tape, repeatedly, in 2016 and 2017. The Justice Department had those recordings and kept them from the public for two years - the same two years it was prosecuting Donald Trump for mishandling classified documents.
Former President Joe Biden speaks during the National Bar Association's 100th Annual Awards Gala in Chicago on July 31, 2025. Nam Y. Huh/AP PhotoThe recordings came out Monday night, released by the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project after a FOIA fight that began in March 2024 and ran first against the Justice Department and then against Biden's personal attorneys. Roughly three hours of audio and 117 pages of transcripts, drawn from the interviews Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained during his investigation into Biden's handling of classified material. The Oversight Project says the complete set runs to about 70 hours and that further releases are coming.
Start with what is on them.
In an October 2016 session, recorded while he was still the sitting vice president, Biden tells ghostwriter Mark Lewis Zwonitzer: "I have extensive notes over this period of time... They didn't even know I had this."
In February 2017, a month after leaving office and living in a Virginia rental: "So this was - I, early on, in '09 - I just found all of the classified stuff downstairs." He then walks Zwonitzer through his 2009 argument against the Afghanistan troop surge.
Joe Biden: "So this was, I early on, um, in '09 I just found all the classified stuff downstairs." pic.twitter.com/lsFlaSZMhC
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) July 27, 2026On April 14, 2017, he stops to warn the man he's talking to: "Some of this may be classified. So, be careful. I'm not sure. ... It's not marked classified, but -"
Joe Biden: "Some of this may be classified so be careful with it." pic.twitter.com/V6wUOH0z8S
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) July 27, 2026Elsewhere in the same period: "The next thing I have here is, um, this is classified."
Hur's report found that Biden read from classified notebooks to Zwonitzer "nearly verbatim, sometimes for an hour or more at a time" on at least three occasions, and that the evidence showed convincingly he knew those notebooks held classified information. The FBI later recovered marked classified documents on Afghanistan policy, along with the notebooks, from the garages, offices and basement den of Biden's Wilmington home.
The transcripts are shot through with redactions. The Oversight Project's argument is that the blackouts are themselves the evidence: "The silence of the redactions loudly demonstrates that Biden knowingly and willfully disclosed classified information to his ghostwriter." Nine years on, the public still isn't cleared to know what he told a man who wasn't cleared to hear it.
The Justice Department Had The Tapes The Whole TimeIn June 2023, the Department of Justice indicted Donald Trump on dozens of counts for retaining classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Espionage Act charges, a special counsel, a grand jury, federal agents inside a former president's home, and a year of argument over whether a man who kept boxes in a bathroom endangered the country.
Through every month of that, the same Department held audio of the sitting president saying he'd found all the classified stuff downstairs. It had obtained the recordings through Hur's investigation, knew their contents in detail, and declined to release them for the remainder of Biden's term.
When Biden's own interview with Hur finally surfaced in May 2025, the Department didn't relent - Axios obtained the five hours of audio and published it.
The ghostwriter tapes took another fourteen months. Once Biden left office and no longer had a department asserting exemptions on his behalf, his private attorneys sued in May 2026 to keep them sealed, arguing the conversations were personal. A federal judge in Washington ruled against him in June. A three-judge panel of the DC Circuit then rejected his appeal 2-1, finding a substantial public interest in disclosure.
He had two moves left - rehearing before the full circuit, or a petition to the Supreme Court - and took neither. His spokesman announced that Biden "respects the courts and the vital role an independent judiciary plays in a healthy democracy," in the same week he stopped resisting one.
The Ghostwriter Deleted The Recordings Before The FBI CalledThe tapes came close to never existing at all. Chapter Seventeen of Hur's report deals with what Zwonitzer did after learning a special counsel had been appointed to investigate Biden. Before the FBI made contact, he deleted the audio files of his Biden interviews from his laptop and from an external hard drive. He described it to investigators plainly: "I simply took the audio files subfolder from both the G drive and my laptop and slid them into the trash. I saved all the transcripts."
Hur's own assessment of what had been destroyed was that the recordings "had significant evidentiary value."
Bureau technicians recovered most of the audio from the external drive, and nothing relevant from the laptop. Three of the recovered files were missing portions. A fourth had been partly overwritten by a different recording. Zwonitzer told investigators he'd been worried about being hacked, and declined to say how much of his motivation was the federal investigation he had just learned about. He wasn't charged - as Hur cited insufficient evidence and found him cooperative and forthright, which he was, after the deletion.
Hur Gave Two Different Answers Five Weeks ApartIn addition to pulling a Comey ('no reasonable prosecutor' vibes), Hur was quite the spin doctor.
In February 2024, Hur wrote that a jury would likely see Biden as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory," and that convicting a former president in his eighties of a felony requiring willfulness would be difficult. It was the only line most people retained from a 345-page report. Biden's own lawyers spent the following week attacking it as gratuitous, and it followed him into every press conference until he left the 2024 race.
Five weeks later, on March 12, 2024, Hur sat before the House Judiciary Committee under oath and was asked why Biden had taken the notebooks in the first place. His answer pointed at money. Biden had "strong motivations to ignore proper procedures for safeguarding his classified" material, Hur testified, and the likely reason he wanted the notebooks was the $8 million three-book deal he'd signed with Flatiron Books in April 2017, reported by Publishers Weekly and covering two books by Biden and one by Jill Biden.
Those two accounts describe different men. One is confused and harmless. The other is a former vice president with a financial motivation to hold onto national security material and a ghostwriter waiting to hear it.
The financial record sits in public filings. The Bidens reported adjusted gross income of $396,456 in 2016, his last full year as vice president, and $11,031,309 in 2017. Promise Me, Dad sold more than 300,000 copies, and Biden took in roughly $1.8 million from thirty book-tour appearances. When Hur's investigators later asked him about the recordings, his written answers maintained that he'd used the word "classified" only loosely around his ghostwriter.
Bottom line: Hur found evidence of disclosure - spoken aloud, to a civilian without clearance, in service of a book contract that Hur himself identified as the motive. Disclosure is what the Espionage Act was written to reach, and the man who did it was never charged, never tried, and never had to sit in a courtroom while a jury listened to the recording.
In February 2025, Trump revoked Biden's security clearances and daily intelligence briefings, citing the special counsel directly: "The Hur Report revealed that Biden suffers from 'poor memory' and, even in his 'prime,' could not be trusted with sensitive information."
Meanwhile, about 67 hours of audio have yet to be released.
Listen to more below:
Tyler Durden Tue, 07/28/2026 - 16:40Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,
Who Caused Unaffordability?Fear about “affordability” supposedly fueled the new, strident socialism.
Yet annual inflation during Biden’s four years averaged almost 5 percent. It peaked at over 9 percent, while prices for some key staples rose by 30 percent over his tenure—all to silence from the Left. (By contrast, annual inflation during Trump’s first term averaged 1.9 percent. In his second term, it averaged 2.6 percent in 2025—and may rise to 4.5 percent in 2026, given the war with Iran.)
The socialists were not just quiet during Biden’s four years; they were themselves responsible for the rampant Biden inflation. They had implemented an inflationary de facto third Obama term, ramming through the most radical and costly agenda in decades under the veneer of that cognitively challenged waxen effigy, good ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton.
So the current Jacobin takeover of the Democratic Party was not sparked by concerns about “affordability”—or at least not if by “affordability” we mean the middle-class struggle to buy a house, a car, or groceries.
Instead, the socialist moment was merely the logical culmination of years of boutique radicalism within the Democratic aristocracy—the ossified leadership of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Hakeem Jeffries, along with the aging Black Caucus, the incoherent Squad, the DEI crowd, the open-border zealots, and the radical greens.
The grandees of the party also normalized the crazy mobs of BLM and Antifa long ago.
Democrats as Dr. FrankensteinAlmost every weaponized scam and national hysteria in the last two decades was amplified and spread by mainstream Democrats: the farcical claim that the Wuhan-lab-hatched COVID virus came from pangolins or bats; the Duke Lacrosse and Covington Kids hoaxes; the Jussie Smollett scam, the “Hands up, don’t shoot” lie; the deification of George Floyd, often portrayed with wings and a halo; Fauxcahontas Liz Warren, touted as the first Native American Harvard law professor (thanks to her grandfather’s high cheekbones); the radical diminution of in-person voting; the canonization of Trayvon Martin and Karmelo Anthony as blameless model children; and the mythology of a 1619 national founding.
Who allowed not just one, two, three, or four million border-jumpers into the country, but over ten million—illegal, unvetted, viewed as an assumed new political constituency, and instantaneously dependent on the welfare state?
Who gave us three, four, five, or even more genders and biological males showering with teenage girls or female prisoners? Who sloganeered about “defund the police” and “no cash bail”?
All this was about as radical as it gets.
The Democratic establishment’s unhinged hatred of Donald Trump mainstreamed radicalism even further and helped birth the socialist-cum-communist Frankensteinian monster that is now devouring its mad-scientist creators.
“By any means necessary” was a Democratic mantra over a decade ago. By 2016, the Democratic leadership and the Clinton campaign were hatching the Steele-dossier farce to warp an election.
In 2020, the Democratic deep state—Antony Blinken, Mike Morell, John Brennan, James Clapper, Leon Panetta, and others—had fabricated the farcical claim that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, a hoax that, this time around, likely did alter an election.
The Democratic establishment, working with its appendages in Silicon Valley, had censored news attesting to the authenticity of Hunter’s embarrassing laptop contents. (For an account of what the establishment was doing in 2020, read Molly Ball’s Time essay describing the “conspiracies” and “cabals” that worked behind the scenes to change voting rules and ensure a Biden victory through mail-in, no-ID balloting.)
Then came four unhinged years of lawfare: special counsel Jack Smith’s seizure of the communications of senators and congressmen, the Mar-a-Lago raid on Trump’s home, the effort to de-ballot Trump, and the five civil and criminal circuses that resulted in half a billion dollars in fines.
All those perversions of the legal system were accompanied by a host of mainstream Democrats, retired generals, politicos, and athletes shouting that Trump was a Nazi, a fascist, a Mussolini, a traitor, or a Putin asset. Meanwhile, a host of loudmouth actors, Democratic activists, and celebrities competed with each other about how best to kill him—whether by shooting, stabbing, poisoning, beheading, burning him alive, or blowing him up.
Trump supporters were libeled over the years by establishment Democrats as irredeemables, deplorables, chumps, dregs, and garbage.
Even an establishment figure like Rosa Brooks, a former Obama-appointed Pentagon lawyer, called for a military coup in Foreign Policy just 10 days after Trump first took office in 2017.
Three would-be assassins got close enough to killing Trump to draw return fire from the Secret Service—near-death encounters that elicited both unapologetic applause for the attempts and lamentations that the shooters had failed from the now truly deranged social-media Left. Murderers themselves were normalized as leftist icons, as seen in the canonization of Luigi Mangione and the glee that followed in many Democratic social media circles after the murder of Charlie Kirk.
Yet did the establishment Democratic apparat calm these waters? Or did it set them boiling?
It was Chuck Schumer who threatened conservative Supreme Court justices, screaming in front of a mob outside the court’s doors, “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.” Schumer sounded more like a pink-haired anti-ICE street protester than a U.S. senator.
No surprise, then, that two years later a left-wing would-be assassin turned up at Kavanaugh’s home, along with crowds of enthusiastic protestors.
Does anyone recall Maxine Waters urging the public to bird-dog Trump administration officials and harass them whenever they were seen in public?
“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out, and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
Does anyone also remember Nancy Pelosi, then-Democratic House Minority leader, greenlighting “uprisings” over ICE deportations?
“I just don’t know why there aren’t uprisings all over the country. Maybe there will be.” So spoke the radical owner of two mansions, who entered Congress with little net worth and will leave it worth over $100 million. A Tip O’Neill she wasn’t.
Then there was soon-to-be Vice President Kamala Harris egging on the George Floyd demonstrations, which, weeks earlier, had already turned violent and indeed deadly (despite what the “fact-checkers” asserted):
This is a movement, I’m telling you. They’re not going to stop. And everyone beware, because they’re not going to stop. They’re not going to stop before Election Day in November, and they’re not going to stop after Election Day. And that should be—everyone should take note of that, on both levels, that they’re not going to let up, and they should not, and we should not.
After four months of rioting in 2020—which left 25 people dead and 1,500 law enforcement officers injured, inflicted $2 billion in damage, and saw a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic church set ablaze—who gave the perpetrators a pass, with 14,000 arrests followed by few convictions and fewer jailings?
What happened during the violence against ICE in 2025–26? Did the Democratic apparat at least pretend to deplore the violence, or did it instead egg it on?
And who, as sore losers in 2016 and 2024, normalized the idea of dismantling the constitutional order—first by calling for the abolition of the Electoral College and later by planning to pack the court, end the filibuster, and admit two new left-wing states?
The Frankenstein Monster AwakensSo the socialists and communists did not really hijack the party. Rather, these youthful radicals were spawned and nurtured by aged Democrats. They became irate over their impotence and loss of influence—and simply upgraded the methods and message of their elders.
The upper-middle-class Mamdanis, Pikers, and AOCs did not storm the party parapets but were invited in by a party that had already radicalized itself—amid its hatred of Donald Trump, its growing estrangement from the majority of the American people, and its fury at becoming increasingly powerless without the White House, Congress, or the Supreme Court.
Socialists did not lower the bar for extremism; establishment Democrats had already destroyed that standard altogether.
Given all that, the Democratic Socialists of America scarcely had to be invented.
After a decade of establishment Democrats destroying norms and traditions, deliberately dividing us by race, seeking to eliminate life-giving fossil fuels, and trying to implement dangerous crackpot ideas like critical race theory, critical legal theory, no cash bail, and defunding the police, the only change is that the now-electrified socialist monsters have awakened. They have mocked their stagnant creators, reenergized the old messages, and simply sought to replace the messengers.
Gone or going soon were the old white people like Pelosi and Schumer—despite their pathetic efforts to appease the Jacobins. In their place arose a cohort of upper-middle-class, degreed but otherwise poorly educated white urbanites, furious that their empty university certificates, student debt, inflated sense of self, and precious titles and jobs—but low salaries—had not delivered the affluent lifestyles enjoyed by lawyers, doctors, stockbrokers, and other professionals in their urban circles who had real jobs.
The downwardly mobile whites who formed 85 percent of the official ranks of the Democratic Socialists of America were joined by first- and second-generation immigrants, many from failed socialist states.
These were ingrates who, once safe and prospering in America, learned that boutique radicalism and identity chauvinism won cultural acceptance and conferred DEI leverage in their blue-state urban circles—and so sought to dismantle the very host nation that had saved them.
For both groups, anger was fed by envy of others with more stuff and by furor at a Middle America that plowed ahead, ignoring both their supposed talents and their hyped plight. And the Democratic Party provided the radical model—which, in their youthful ignorance, the new socialists pledged to enhance and exceed.
No longer, they thought, would hardcore leftists have to hide their agendas for fear of losing elections. In their folly, they attributed Harris’s 2024 implosion not to her clumsy efforts to disown and disguise her radical past (including the most left-wing voting record in the Senate), but to her not being left-wing enough.
In other words, a milquetoast socialist had lost in 2024 not because she was too radical for America, but because she was not socialist—or indeed, communist—enough.
The crazed new socialists bragged that they could win by loudly and brazenly broadcasting the old agendas: open borders, mass amnesties, defunding the police, ending fossil fuels, attacking—and now seeking to destroy—the Senate and Supreme Court, and scapegoating whites and white “privilege.” To this old mainstream Democratic farrago, they added one new element: openly embracing anti-Zionism and indeed antisemitism.
America will soon see how this insanity works out.
Tyler Durden Tue, 07/28/2026 - 16:20