Audio of 2023 Biden Interview with Hur Reveals Pauses, Halting Replies
Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post
President Joe Biden is shown on a video as special counsel Robert K. Hur appears before the House Judiciary Committee in March 2024.
An excerpt from the audio recording of a prosecutor's interview with President Joe Biden in 2023 shows Biden speaking slowly, often with long pauses, as he seeks to mentally assemble a sequence of events including his son Beau's death, his own departure from the vice presidency and the launch of his book.
The excerpt, obtained by Axios, does not provide new information, since the written transcript of special counsel Robert K. Hur's interview with Biden was released in March 2024. Hur was investigating allegations that Biden mishandled sensitive documents after he left the vice presidency in 2017.
But the long pauses and the widely meandering nature of the president's responses, as he seeks to recall events from several years earlier, are striking and flesh out the picture of the high-stakes session.
President Donald Trump, 78, has repeatedly criticized Biden, now 82, as aging and mentally slow, continuing to take multiple shots at his predecessor well into his second term. That raised expectations that Trump would release the audio, something the Biden administration had refused to do. Earlier on Friday, Trump had said it was up to Attorney General Pam Bondi to decide whether and when to release the audio.
Biden spokeswoman Kelly Scully downplayed the release of the audio Friday: 'The transcripts were released by the Biden administration more than a year ago. The audio does nothing but confirm what is already public.'
Trump also came under scrutiny for mishandling classified documents after leaving office, though the scale and scope of the allegations against him were much broader.
Special counsel Jack Smith charged Trump in connection with the discovery of hundreds of classified documents that were taken to his home in Florida after he left the White House. A federal judge ruled that Smith lacked jurisdiction; Smith appealed but then dropped the case after Trump was elected to a second term as president.
Questions about Biden's capacity toward the end of his presidency have reemerged in recent days due to the publication of a book, 'Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,' by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson. It argues that Biden's aides hid his deteriorating condition from the public, a claim that Biden's office sharply denies.
The audio excerpt obtained by Axios is a roughly four-minute segment of a much longer interview that took place over two days.
In the excerpt, Hur asks where Biden kept documents for the projects he was working on at that time.
Biden takes a long pause, then replies, 'Well, I, I, I, I, I, I don't know, this is what, 2017, '18, that area?' He adds, 'Remember, in this time frame, my son was either deployed or is dying.' Beau died in 2015.
The president then appears to be searching his mind for exactly what was going on in his life during that period. 'What was happening, though – what month did Beau die? Oh god, May 30th. Was it 2015?' Biden says. ' … And what's happened in the meantime is that … and Trump gets elected in 2017?' Someone reminds Biden that it was 2016.
Biden then begins talking about Beau's death, with numerous long pauses, either because he is trying to jog his memory or because he is overcome by emotion. The interviews also were taking place on Oct. 8, 2023, and Oct. 9, 2023, immediately after the Hamas attacks on Israel, a horrifying moment that became one of the biggest crises of Biden's presidency.
'In 2017, Beau had passed and … This is personal …' Biden says. 'The genesis of the book was … I know you're all close with your sons and daughters, but Beau was like my right arm, and Hunter was my left. These guys were a year and a day apart, and they could finish each other's sentences.'
There are more long pauses, as Biden at this point has wandered relatively far from the initial question about where he stored documents. He begins talking about how he would travel home by train when he was in the Senate, then reiterates how close he was to Beau, prompting Hur to ask, 'Sir, I wonder if this is a good time to take a break?'
Biden answers, 'No, let me keep going and get it done.'
Although the recording does not include any startling new revelations, it provides a rare, dramatic window into a pivotal historical moment, as a sitting president was being questioned by a special counsel about a politically explosive matter.
Biden's office in recent days has stressed that, for all the debate about his mental acuity, no allegations have emerged that Biden struggled to make decisions or perform his duties as president.
'We continue to await anything that shows where Joe Biden had to make a presidential decision or where national security was threatened or where he was unable to do his job,' a spokesperson said this week. 'In fact, the evidence points to the opposite – he was a very effective president.'
In early 2024, Hur decided against filing charges of mishandling classified documents. He said his reasoning, in part, was that jurors would be unlikely to convict Biden because they would see him as a 'well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.'
Democrats erupted in fury, saying Hur's characterization was a gratuitous slap. At the time, Biden was the likely Democratic nominee for president, and Hur's comment played into Republican assertions that he was not up to serving four more years.
Biden has often struggled with words and been given to gaffes throughout his half-century public career, and his supporters argued that his occasional slurs or verbal miscues were irrelevant to his mental abilities. Biden pushed ahead with his campaign until last summer, when a stumbling debate performance against Trump reignited the concerns about his age and prompted him to withdraw from the race.
In recent days, amid the publication of the book and a pair of television appearances by Biden, a growing number of Democrats have been revisiting their handling of the last presidential election and saying publicly that it was poorly managed.
Biden's late withdrawal from the 2024 race prevented other major figures from jumping in, and it gave Vice President Kamala Harris a sharply condensed time frame for introducing herself as the nominee and making her case to voters.
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