A transcript had been released last year, but newly public audio of a special counsel's 2023 interview brings President Biden's halting answers and memory failings to life, putting them in real-time context complete with long pauses. The recordings capture Biden's difficulty remembering when his son Beau died, when his term as vice president ended, and when Donald Trump was first elected president, reports Axios, which released the audio on Friday night. Biden, who's now 82, also struggled to answer why he had classified documents in his possession—the subject of the session—when asked by special counsel Robert Hur.
The Biden administration claimed executive privilege in declining to release the audio when it released the transcript, per the New York Times. A Biden spokeswoman said Saturday that the audio only confirms what was already public. The conversational detours Biden took during the interview, per Axios, included the Corvette he drove with Jay Leno, the walnut wood and seven kinds of molding in his home's refurbished rooms, the technological influence that Johannes Gutenberg's printing press had on Europe, and the fact that he once shot a bow and arrow in Mongolia.
The interview sounds mostly friendly, though the tension picked up when a Biden attorney suggested Hur's co-counsel was steering the president to consider changing his reason for why he had a classified document about Afghanistan, asking if his motivation was the historical value. "I guess I wanted to hang onto it just for posterity's sake," Biden replied, though Bob Bauer at one point told the president, "Your answer is that you don't know." When Hur decided not to pursue charges over his retention of classified documents, he said Biden came across as a "well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory." (New books portray Biden as in decline while still in office.)
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