'I just found all the classified stuff downstairs' - Biden to ghostwriter

Audio recordings that Joe Biden fought for years to keep private - in which he acknowledges possessing classified material after leaving office 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, titled Promise Me, Dad. "I just found all the classified stuff downstairs," Biden is heard saying at one point in the audio, recorded in February 2017, a month after he left the White House.House Republicans and a conservative nonprofit, the Oversight Project, sued for the tapes, which were handed over for a 2024 justice department probe into Biden's handling of the records.Biden's spokesman, TJ Ducklo, said in a statement that releasing the tapes was "just the latest example of this Administration weaponizing the DOJ for political retribution". "It's wrong, and while President Biden disagrees with today's decision, he also respects the courts and the vital role an independent judiciary plays in a healthy democracy," he added.The audio was recorded during the drafting of the 2017 memoir that Biden penned with co-writer Mark Zwonitzer. At one point in the more than two hours of tapes released on Monday, Biden tells the ghostwriter: "The next thing I have here is, um, this is classified."In an October 2016 recording, he tells Zwonitzer: "I have extensive notes over this period of time… They [the White House] didn't know I have this."At the time, Biden was still serving as vice-president to Barack Obama.During Biden's tenure as president from 2021-25, the justice department declined to release the audio tapes. In May, his personal lawyers sued the justice department in an effort to keep the tapes private, but after legal defeats they dropped their lawsuit.The recordings contain significant redactions, which Republicans on the House Oversight Committee say "are intended to cover [Biden's] disclosure of classified information".In 2024, Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained the recordings and transcripts while investigating Biden's handling of classified documents.Hur found Biden improperly retained records, but he did not recommend charges, partly because of concerns that a jury would take his side and view him as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory".Donald Trump was charged with illegally retaining the documents at his home in Florida, but the charges were dropped after he returned to the White House.