Court Filings Show DOJ Holds Transcripts of Biden’s Ghostwriter Interviews

DOJ Has TRANSCRIPTS of Ghostwriter Interviews

Attorneys for the Department of Justice revealed in court filings on Monday that the DOJ possesses transcripts of discussions between President Joe Biden and his ghostwriter in which the president may have disclosed sensitive information.

 

The lawyers responded to a lawsuit filed by the right-wing Heritage Foundation by acknowledging the transcripts.

 

The former special counsel Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s handling of secret documents contained references to a number of records and papers that the Heritage Foundation had requested. Audio recordings of Biden’s conversations with Mark Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter of the president’s memoir Promise Me, Dad, was one of the requests.

 

Attorneys for the DOJ announced on Monday that in processing “portions of the Biden-Zwonitzer audio recordings that the parties agreed to,” they had found transcripts of some of the audio in the “past few days.”

 

“A court-reporting service created a small subset of the Biden-Zwonitzer audio recordings for the SCO, and the Department located six electronic files, totaling 117 pages that appeared to be verbatim transcripts of those recordings,” the attorneys stated.

 

At a hearing last month, the lawyer stated, “We don’t have some transcript that’s been created by the special counsel that we can attest to its accuracy, unlike the case of the special counsel and his interviews with the president.”

Several organizations, including the Heritage Foundation, have filed a lawsuit against the DOJ for withholding information from Hur’s probe.

 

The plaintiffs requested audio records of Hur’s conversation with Biden the previous year. A transcript of the interview was made public by the DOJ, but they maintain that the recordings are secret due to executive privilege.

 

Hur stated in his final report that Biden had evidence of cognitive deterioration during the interview, which is one of the reasons the special counsel decided not to bring charges against the president for improperly handling classified material.

 

Hur’s report, however, also benefited greatly from the 2016 and 2017 interviews that Zwonitzer and Biden conducted.

 

Hur claimed that during the book’s writing, Biden occasionally read Zwonitzer “nearly word-for-word” notes he had written during secret meetings while serving as vice president.

 

According to the DOJ, there are over 70 hours’ worth of audio between Zwonitzer and Biden. 

 

For months, the department and the Heritage Foundation have been embroiled in a legal battle over documents from the DOJ pertaining to Hur. The parties called off their Tuesday hearing, which was supposed to take place. A new date is anticipated for the upcoming days.

 

After the special counsel decided not to prosecute Biden despite discovering that he had been careless with sensitive records from his time as senator and vice president and had given confidential information to Zwonitzer, Hur’s investigative materials became of great interest to the NGOs.

 

Hur heightened interest when he repeatedly referred to Biden’s mental sharpness in the study he published in February. The president’s suitability for office was under increasing criticism, which finally caused him to withdraw his reelection campaign this week.