‘I’ve got all the classifieds below’ – Biden to ghostwriter

The tapes Joe Biden has fought to keep secret for years – which he admitted contained classified information after serving as US vice president – have been released by Republicans in Congress.

The tapes contain interviews between Biden, now 83, and a ghostwriter working on his 2017 memoir.

“I got all the classifieds downstairs,” Biden is heard saying at one point in the audio, which was recorded a month after he left the White House in February 2017.

House Republicans and the non-conservative Oversight Project have sued Biden over the tapes provided for the 2024 Justice Department investigation into his handling of records.

In a statement, Biden spokesman TJ Daclo said the release of the tapes was “the latest example of this administration arming the DOJ for political revenge.”

“It’s wrong, and while President Biden disagrees with today’s decision, he respects the courts and the critical role an independent judiciary plays in a healthy democracy,” he added.

The audio was recorded while the 2017 memoir, which Biden co-wrote with colleague Mark Zonitzer, was in draft.

At one point in the more than two hours of tapes released on Monday, Biden told the ghostwriter: “The next thing I have here, um, this is classified.

In the year In an October 2016 taping, he told Zwonitzer: “I have extensive notes from this period… They (the White House) didn’t know I had this.”

At the time, Biden was still serving as Barack Obama’s vice president.

During Biden’s 2021-25 presidency, the Justice Department refused to release the audio tapes.

In May, the private attorneys sued the Justice Department to keep the tapes secret, but dropped their lawsuit after a legal defeat.

The tapes contained significant redactions, which Republicans on the House Oversight Committee said were “intended to cover up Biden’s disclosure of classified information.”

In the year In 2024, special counsel Robert Hurr discovered the transcripts and transcripts while investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents.

Hurr found that Biden had tampered with records, but did not recommend charges, in part because jurors viewed him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a failing memory.”

Donald Trump was accused of illegally keeping the documents at his Florida home, but the charges were dropped after he returned to the White House.