The audio of Special Counsel Hur’s interview with Biden finally comes to light: the former president’s severe cognitive decline is exposed

A series of recordings obtained by Axios reveal what the White House and the Democratic Party tried to hide during the last presidential campaign: the severe cognitive impairment of former President Joe Biden while in office.

The audios, which correspond to two interviews conducted in October 2023 by the special prosecutor Robert Hur, show a confused, hesitant Biden with a weak voice, long silences, and evident difficulties remembering facts that marked his life or US politics, such as the date of death of his son Beau or the year in which Donald Trump was elected president for the first time.

The audios belong to the investigation conducted by prosecutor Hur against Biden for improper possession of classified documents.

In a key part of the interrogation, prosecutor Hur asks him about a phrase Biden said in 2017 to his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer: "I just found all the classified stuff downstairs."

Asked about that statement, the then-president replied that he had no recollection of the matter.

-"I don't remember. And I'm not supposed to speculate, right?"

-"Correct," replied his lawyer Bob Bauer.

-"So — OK, well, I don't remember and it may have been — I just don't remember."

Special prosecutor Hur, in his criticized report, justified his decision not to bring criminal charges against Biden on the grounds that the president was going to be seen by a jury as an old person with a bad memory.

"It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president, well into his 80s — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness," Hur wrote in his brief.

Hur also wrote that a jury would likely view him as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."

That report earned prosecutor Hur multiple criticisms. The White House, on the one hand, took aim at him for having "political motivations," and Trump's campaign team, on the other hand, accused him of legally protecting the then-Democratic president in the middle of the election campaign.

During the interview, Biden's own lawyers had to intervene several times to prevent the former president from incriminating himself.

In one passage, when the president suggests that he may have kept a classified document on Afghanistan for historical reasons, his lawyer quickly interrupts him:

- "Your answer is that you don't know," Bauer told the prosecutor in a scolding tone.

He later clarified, "He does not recall specifically intending to keep this memo after he left the vice presidency."

Despite the fact that President Biden was already going through severe cognitive and memory problems, the White House refused to release the audios in 2023, when media outlets and Republicans demanded it. Moreover, the Democratic Party backed Biden's candidacy in unison until it collapsed in the first debates with Donald Trump.

For example, then-Vice Chairwoman Kamala Harris, who later replaced Biden himself in the race, called Hur's report" "gratuitous, inaccurate, and inappropriate."

"The way that the president's demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly politically motivated," Harris said. "We should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw."