Newly released audio from Axios reveals that former President Joe Biden struggled with his memory during an interview with then-special counsel Robert Hur.
The audio recording reveals that Biden had difficulty remembering when his late son, Beau Biden, died and when now-President Donald Trump was elected during his first term in office, among other things, Axios reported.
“So, during this time when you were living at Chain Bridge Road and there were documents relating to the Penn Biden Center or the Biden Institute, or the Cancer Moonshot, or your book, where did you keep papers that related to those things that you were actively working?” Hur can be heard asking Biden.
“Well…. I, I, I, I, I, I don’t know. This is what — 2017, 2018, that area?” Biden asked.
“Yes, sir,” Hur said.
“Remember, in this time frame, my son is either been deployed or is dying,” Biden said, referring to Beau, who died in 2015 from brain cancer. “And, so, it was, and by the way, there are still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period, except the president. I’m not — it’s not a mean thing to say, he just thought that she had a better shot of winning the presidency than I did.”
“And, so, I hadn’t, I hadn’t at this point, even though I’m at Penn, I hadn’t walked away from the idea that I might run for office again,” Biden continued. “You know, if I ran again I’d be running for president, and so what was happening though — What month did Beau die? Oh, God, May 30? Was it 2015 he died? I think it’s 2015.”
“Trump gets elected in November of 2017?” Biden can also be heard asking at one point in the interview.
– News previously reported in March 2024 that a transcript of the interview showed Biden had experienced several mental lapses and instances of having poor memory.
The outlet’s release of the audio comes after the Biden administration refused to release the recordings of Biden’s interview with Hur. As – News previously reported, in May 2024, Biden invoked executive privilege to block a subpoena from House Republicans seeking to obtain audio recordings of his interview with Hur.
– News’s John Nolte reported that the Trump administration was considering releasing the interview between Biden and Hur over “Biden’s flagrant misuse of classified documents”:
Back in early 2024, Hur investigated Biden’s flagrant misuse of classified documents, which were “willfully retained” by Biden and found in seven separate places in several locations. Hur stated that he did not call on Biden to be charged with “willfully retaining and disclosing classified materials” — a violation of law — because of Biden’s diminished mental acuity.
In February 2024, Hur revealed that he would not charge Biden for his handling of classified documents. However, Hur’s report stated that they had “considered that, at trial,” a jury would see Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur’s report says. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt.”
