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Go figure … DOJ suddenly located Biden biographer’s transcripts from Hur report

August 15, 2024 | | Print Article

The Department of Justice has miraculously located the previously missing transcripts from an interview between President Joe Biden and his biographer.

The transcripts of the conversations between Biden and biographer Mark Zwonitzer are important because they were used by Special Counsel Robert Hur in determining the president’s culpability for mishandling classified documents.

“There do exist written transcripts of President Biden’s interviews with his ghostwriter where they discuss classified material, and that Special Counsel Hur relied upon those written transcripts in coming to his conclusions,” the DOJ told the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, according to Fox News.

The Oversight Project previously sued to have the materials from Hur’s investigation, including the aforementioned transcripts, made public.

As a reminder, Hur ultimately concluded that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen” but that “no criminal charges are warranted in this matter” because Biden was too senile to blame.

Meanwhile, DOJ lawyer Cameron Silverberg wrote in a filing late last month that the department had finally found the transcripts, according to Newsweek.

“In the past few days, in the course of processing the portions of the Biden-Zwonitzer audio recordings that the parties agreed to…the Department located six electronic files, consisting of a total of 117 pages, that appeared to be verbatim transcripts of a small subset of the Biden-Zwonitzer audio recordings created for the [special counsel’s office] by a court-reporting service,” the filing reads.

Now that the transcripts have finally been found and publicly revealed, the Oversight Project is planning its next moves.

“The discovery of those materials has been the subject of a lot of back-and-forth between us and the Justice Department about how we want to proceed,” Oversight Project counsel Kyle Brosnan told Fox News. “We’re trying to figure out how that discovery impacts the case and kind of what the next steps are there.”

This discovery comes after the Justice Department initially claimed in June — when President Biden was still running for president — that the transcripts didn’t exist. It’s not clear yet how the transcripts just miraculously appeared after Biden dropped out.

Also still technically missing are the tapes of the discussions between Biden and Hur himself. Attorney General Merrick Garland has refused to turn over the tapes, citing the alleged precedent set by a memo written by former AG Michael Mukasey in 2008.

“The [memo], which Mr. Mukasey authored during special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s probe into the unmasking of CIA spy Valerie Plame, was used by the White House to explain why Mr. Biden invoked executive privilege to block access to the recordings,” according to The Washington Times.

In a letter to Congress, Garland cited the memo in claiming that releasing the Hur tapes would discourage future witness cooperation. There’s just one problem with this argument: Mukasey himself doesn’t buy it:

“I believe the assertion of executive privilege made here goes well beyond the limits of any prior assertion and is not supported by the 2008 Executive Privilege Letter or other precedents relied upon by the Department,” he wrote in a court filing back in June.

“The reasons for invoking the privilege are entirely unconvincing and I believe that by pressing this flawed privilege assertion, the Department has lost sight of the true institutional interests of the presidency and is putting at risk the important traditions and principles on which the doctrine of executive privilege rests and this the ability of this and future presidents to invoke that doctrine when necessary and appropriate,” he added.

He also reportedly wrote that the Biden White House’s earlier decision to release a transcript of the Biden/Hur interview voided any “expectation of confidentiality.”

He concluded by noting that the tapes could help shed more light on why the special prosecutor didn’t charge Biden despite having concluded that the president had “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials.”

Vivek Saxena
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