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By Andrew Stanton
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The Department of Justice (DOJ) has found transcripts from an interview between President Joe Biden and his biographer, Mark Zwonitzer, which federal prosecutors previously said they did not have.
The transcripts are related to DOJ Special Counsel Robert Hur's investigation into whether Biden violated the law after classified documents were found at his private residence in Delaware and former office at the Penn Biden Center. Hur concluded Biden "willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen," but concluded "no criminal charges are warranted in this matter."
The conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation has filed a case to make public some of the materials from his investigation, including audio recordings of a conversation between Biden and Zwonitzer. The DOJ previously said it would process portions of that audio, but it was not in possession of a transcript of the recording, according to court documents.
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However, DOJ lawyer Cameron Silverberg wrote in a filing on Monday night that prosecutors have now found this transcript.
"In the past few days, in the course of processing the portions of the Biden-Zwonitzer audio recordings that the parties agreed to...the Department located six electronic files, consisting of a total of 117 pages, that appeared to be verbatim transcripts of a small subset of the Biden-Zwonitzer audio recordings created for the [special counsel's office] by a court-reporting service," the filing reads.
Newsweek reached out to the DOJ for comment via its online contact form.
The exact content of the transcript remained unknown on Tuesday.
According to the filing, the DOJ planned to reach out to "an individual with knowledge of the SCO files with whom the Department had previously consulted" who was out of office. The department then reached out to Hur to ask about the nature of the transcript.
"Mr. Hur confirmed that the identified files were in fact transcripts of a subset of the Biden Zwonitzer audio recordings, created by a court-reporting service at the SCO's request. These transcripts were indeed the transcripts referred to in the Hur Report, though they were not cited in any of the Passages in Plaintiffs' FOIA request," the filing reads.
Hur told the department that in making statements highlighted in the Heritage Foundation's request, he generally relied on the original audio recordings, according to the document.
Hur's report, while clearing Biden of any criminal wrongdoing, sparked concerns about his fitness for office. Hur wrote that Biden's "memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023.
"At trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt."
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