The Department of Justice (DOJ) has suddenly located the “missing” transcripts from interviews with lame-duck President Joe Biden and his biographer that were central to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s classified documents probe, a watchdog has revealed.
The special counsel was investigating Biden’s mishandling of classified material before and during his term as president.
Hur notably declined to prosecute Biden due to his deteriorated mental state, despite finding evidence that he had mishandled the classified documents.
In his infamous report, Hur noted that a jury wouldn’t convict Biden because they would see him as a confused old man.
Hur said he came to this conclusion after interviewing Biden, whom he said struggled to remember key details about his own life, such as the year his son died or when he served as vice president.
The special counsel also reviewed transcripts of interviews between Biden and his biographer, during which they discussed handling classified documents.
Due to the bombshell nature of Hur’s assessment, congressional investigators have been trying to get hold of the transcripts and recordings to establish Biden’s fitness for office.
However, Biden’s DOJ has been pushing back – until now.
Shortly after Biden was replaced on the Democrat presidential ticket by VP Kamala Harris, the DOJ has now revealed the mysterious discovery of 117 pages of transcribed discussions between the president and his ghostwriter.
The find was highlighted Wednesday by the Oversight Project, a conservative government transparency watchdog that sued the DOJ.
The ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, was previously subject to a March subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee.
The GOP-led committee sought any and all documents, contracts, and recordings of interviews and conversations with Biden.
However, Oversight Project counsel Kyle Brosnan said on Wednesday this particular revelation is both new and further animates the need for transparency in regard to questions about Biden’s competency.
Brosnan said that just prior to the Oversight Project’s last hearing on the matter, the Justice Department informed the court of the transcripts.
“There do exist written transcripts of President Biden’s interviews with his ghostwriter where they discuss classified material, and that Special Counsel Hur relied upon those written transcripts in coming to his conclusions [that Biden was a ‘well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory’].”
Zwonitzer wrote Biden’s memoir “Promise Me, Dad,” which was released in 2017.
“The discovery of those materials has been the subject of a lot of back-and-forth between us and the Justice Department about how we want to proceed,” Brosnan added.
“We’re trying to figure out how that discovery impacts the case and kind of what the next steps are there.”
According to a court filing, DOJ officials flagged the apparent discovery to the bench.
Plaintiff Mike Howell, Brosnan’s colleague and the executive director of the Oversight Project, was then made aware of the find.
The officials wrote that in their prior June court appearance they attested that Hur’s office did not have a verbatim transcript of any Zwonitzer-Biden recordings.
The DOJ then noted Howell’s team “questioned this representation” and pointed out a footnote in a document that supposedly suggested it was sourced from a transcript.
When department officials could not reach anyone with knowledge of special counsel office files, they reached out directly to Hur.
Hur confirmed the files were indeed transcripts of a subset of Zwonitzer-Biden recordings.
Brosnan confirmed negotiations with the DOJ are now ongoing as to how to handle the new tranche.
“There’s over 70 hours of tapes between Biden and Zwonitzer,” he said.
“So, that’s obviously a lot of material that’s going to take the Justice Department a long time to process.”
As for his team’s larger legal issues with the DOJ – the exertion of executive privilege over the Hur tapes –, Brosnan said one of the administration’s major claims appears to be undermined by the former official they cited.
After Congress was given a transcript of the Hur-Biden interview, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s 2008 memo shielding White House interoffice communications was cited by the Biden administration as part of its executive privilege argument.
However, Mukasey himself said in a June court filing that while he supports the tool of executive privilege, the Biden admin’s assertion is “flawed.”
Mukasey, who served under former President George W. Bush, wrote of Biden:
“I believe the assertion of executive privilege made here goes well beyond the limits of any prior assertion and is not supported by the 2008 executive privilege letter.”
“The reasons given for invoking this privilege are entirely unconvincing.”
https://slaynews.com/news/doj-suddenly-finds-biden-biographer-missing-transcripts-special-counsel-probe/
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