The DOJ admitted to a federal judge Monday that there are, in fact, transcripts of Biden’s meetings with his biographer, Mark Zwonitzer, for Biden’s 2007 and 2017 memoirs, according to a report by Politico.
Earlier, the department had told U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich that it would be too time-consuming to transcribe roughly 70 hours of audio files and screen them for classified content.
“We don’t have some transcript that’s been created by the special counsel that we can attest to its accuracy,” Justice Department lawyer Cameron Silverberg said during a June 18 regarding a suit brought by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative organization, according to the report.
But early this week, Silverberg told the court there had been a new development on that front.
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“In the past few days…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,” he reported, according to Politico.
The Heritage Foundation was just one of many news outlets and conservative organizations that “swamped” the DOJ with requests for documentation after a report by special counsel Robert Hur was issued in February, Politico reported.
In his report, Hur explained he had decided against criminally prosecuting Biden for alleged mishandling classified documents because the president came across as “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
That startling declaration about the U.S. commander in chief launched a congressional investigation in addition to the lawsuits and Freedom of Information Act requests “demanding access to various records related to Hur’s probe,” according to the liberal political news outlet.
The DOJ “also reversed itself on another matter,” Politico reported, explaining that the department had initially “resisted requests from Heritage to contact Hur and find out what materials he relied upon for key portions of his report.”
But in the end, the DOJ “relented” and contacted Hur, who “acknowledged relying on the Biden-Zwonitzer audio — as well as a portion of Biden’s handwritten notes pertaining to a memo about Afghanistan — to compile his report.”
Some observers had a cynical response to the to the news of the recently discovered transcripts and questioned the timing of the revelation.
“Now that Biden’s not running, it’s AMAZING what info DOJ can cough up,” GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri commented in a post on social media platform X.
The Oversight Project, an arm of the Heritage Foundation, was equally skeptical.
“For months, we have been in court seeking records that Hur relied upon in making the statements in his report where he raised concerns about President Biden’s mental acuity,” the organization said.
“For months, DOJ has been adamant to us and the judge that they didn’t need to talk to Hur and invented a search protocol to avoid accountability and transparency,” the organization continued in the second of a thread of four posts on the matter.
The posts continued: “Now, less than 12 hours before a hearing and after we briefed this issue, DOJ makes this ‘discovery.’
“We are pleased we forced DOJ to finally come clean and will continue to press our case in court to obtain these records for the American people.
“Make no mistake, we forced this issue. The Biden tapes are coming out. When senior Democrats on the Hill realized this they began separating publicly from @JoeBiden.”
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