Biden Deposition: Hur Report, Audio Release, and 2026 Lawsuit

Special Counsel Robert Hur’s deposition of Joe Biden took place over two days in October 2023 and became the centerpiece of a February 2024 report that declined to bring charges while describing the president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” The interview transcript, released in March 2024, ran 258 pages. The audio leaked publicly in May 2025, and Biden sued in May 2026 to block the release of related recordings made by his memoir ghostwriter.

When and How the Interview Happened

Biden sat voluntarily for Hur’s team on October 8 and 9, 2023, in the White House Map Room. The two sessions totaled more than five hours. His personal attorney, Bob Bauer, was present and intervened at several points.¹²

The questioning covered Biden’s transition out of government in January 2017, the writing of his memoir Promise Me, Dad, how he handled the Presidential Daily Brief as vice president, a classified handwritten memo he had sent President Obama about the 2009 Afghanistan troop surge, and where his personal notebooks had been stored across his Virginia, Wilmington, and Rehoboth Beach homes.¹

What Biden Said During the Deposition

The 258-page transcript showed Biden speaking at length and often with detail on policy matters while struggling repeatedly with specific dates and sequences. He used phrases like “I don’t recall” or “I have no idea” more than a hundred times.¹

On the Afghanistan memo, Biden said, “I guess I wanted to hang onto it just for posterity’s sake,” before Bauer stepped in to steer him away from speculation. On the notebooks found in his home, he was emphatic: “They are mine,” he said, arguing that “every president before me has done the exact same thing.”¹

On the second day, prosecutors played him a 2017 recording in which he told his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.” Biden said, “I don’t remember.” Asked about the year his son Beau died, he initially placed it in 2017 or 2018 before his attorneys supplied 2015. He also misplaced the year of Donald Trump’s first election, saying 2017 instead of 2016.³⁴

NPR, reviewing the full transcript when it was released in March 2024, described a “more nuanced portrait” than the report’s summary conveyed: Biden spoke with confidence about complex policy alongside the memory lapses.¹

Why Hur Declined to Prosecute

Hur submitted his final report on February 5, 2024. His conclusion was that “no criminal charges are warranted.” Setting aside the Justice Department’s longstanding policy against prosecuting a sitting president, Hur wrote, the evidence did not establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.⁵

The report found that Biden had “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” after his vice presidency, including sharing contents of his handwritten notebooks with Zwonitzer. But Hur identified several defenses that would complicate a prosecution. Biden could argue he believed the notebooks were his personal property, citing the precedent of President Ronald Reagan, who kept handwritten diaries containing classified information at his home for nearly two decades. In that earlier matter the Justice Department had publicly described Reagan’s diaries as “personal records” and never opened an investigation. Hur also noted there was no conclusive evidence placing the classified Afghanistan documents at Biden’s Virginia home in 2017, and Biden’s cooperation throughout the investigation contrasted with the conduct alleged in the separate Trump classified documents case.⁵

The marked classified Afghanistan documents, with markings up to Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, had been found in what the report called a “badly damaged box” in Biden’s Delaware garage, surrounded by a collapsed dog crate, potting soil, and a broken lamp wrapped in duct tape. Hur wrote that the scene suggested “a place a person stores classified documents he has forgotten about or is unaware of.” The notebooks had been recovered from unlocked drawers in Biden’s home office and basement den.⁶⁷

The “Elderly Man With a Poor Memory” Line

The passage that drove the political reaction was Hur’s assessment that a jury would see Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Hur wrote that Biden’s “significant limitations” on memory would make it difficult to convict him of a felony requiring proof of willfulness.⁸

Biden pushed back hard, especially at the report’s references to his son’s death. “How in the hell dare he raise that?” he said. Bauer called the report “a shabby piece of work” with “totally inappropriate and pejorative comments.” The White House counsel formally objected to the memory characterizations as “inflammatory” and “highly prejudicial.”⁸⁹

Then-Vice President Kamala Harris called Hur’s comments on Biden’s age “gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate.” Republicans attacked from the other side, questioning why Biden was not charged and contrasting the outcome with Trump’s federal indictment in his own classified documents case.³

Hur testified before the House Judiciary Committee on March 12, 2024, and defended his report. He told lawmakers his assessment of Biden’s memory was “necessary and accurate and fair” and that “politics played no part” in his conclusions. Democrats on the panel called the memory characterizations politically motivated; Republicans pressed him on why no charges were brought.¹⁰

Executive Privilege and the Garland Contempt Vote

House Republicans subpoenaed the audio recordings of the Biden interview as part of a broader impeachment inquiry. On May 16, 2024, the Justice Department told Congress that Biden had formally asserted executive privilege over the recordings of both his interview and Zwonitzer’s. White House Counsel Ed Siskel argued the assertion was needed to protect law enforcement from “undue partisan interference” and said he was concerned the audio would be “distorted” for political purposes.¹¹

The House voted 216 to 207 on June 12, 2024, to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over the audio. Only one Republican, Rep. Dave Joyce of Ohio, voted against it. The Justice Department declined to prosecute Garland, citing its longstanding position that officials asserting a president’s claim of executive privilege cannot be prosecuted for criminal contempt.¹²¹³

How the Audio Became Public

Axios obtained and published the audio of Biden’s interview with Hur in May 2025. How the outlet got the recordings was not clear; the Biden administration had fought to keep them sealed, and the Trump administration had been planning its own release. A Biden spokesperson pointed out that the transcripts had already been public for more than a year.¹⁴³

The recordings matched what the written transcript had already shown but added dimensions the page could not: long silences, a dry whisper of a voice, moments of slurred or mumbled speech, and the ticking of a grandfather clock in the Map Room while Biden searched for words. The audio also captured Biden sounding engaged on the second day, telling stories about working with Obama and speaking with vigor about policy.³

Biden’s 2026 Lawsuit Over the Ghostwriter Tapes

The fight in 2026 shifted to a separate body of audio: roughly 70 hours of recordings Zwonitzer made with Biden during their memoir sessions in 2016 and 2017. The DOJ had obtained those recordings during the Hur investigation. The Heritage Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act request for them in April 2024, and under the Trump administration the DOJ reversed its earlier position, telling U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich it planned to release the audio to Congress and to Heritage.¹⁵

Biden sued the DOJ in federal court in Washington on May 26, 2026, to block the release. His attorneys argued disclosure would be an “unwarranted invasion of President Biden’s privacy” and that “every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home.” They also argued the DOJ has a “particular responsibility to protect” information obtained during a criminal investigation, and that the recordings had been given to Hur on the understanding they would not be made public.¹⁶¹⁷

DOJ spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre said the recordings “clearly demonstrate a significant decline” in Biden’s mental state and that the government wanted the public to “draw their own conclusions about the former President’s mental acuity.”¹⁸

Judge Friedrich ruled for the Heritage Foundation on June 20, 2026, finding that the public interest under FOIA outweighed Biden’s privacy concerns. She noted the recordings were significantly redacted and contained no information about Biden’s family or other private persons. Biden’s legal team filed for an injunction pending appeal, and Friedrich granted a three-week pause for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to consider the matter. The appeal was still pending as of late June 2026.¹⁹²⁰

The Zwonitzer Thread Inside the Investigation

Zwonitzer himself had been investigated during the Hur probe. After learning in early 2023 that a special counsel had been appointed, he deleted audio recordings from his laptop and external hard drive. He later told investigators he routinely deleted audio to protect interviewee privacy and had concerns about hacking and about keeping Biden’s private reflections on Beau’s death out of print. The FBI recovered the deleted files forensically, though some portions were incomplete. Zwonitzer turned over his devices, consented to searches, and provided near-verbatim transcripts, including segments with incriminating material he could have destroyed.²¹

Hur declined to prosecute Zwonitzer for obstruction, concluding the evidence was not sufficient to prove intent to impede the investigation and that preserving the transcripts and cooperating voluntarily cut against that theory.⁵

1
NPR. Biden Hur Report Memory Classified Documents
2
U.S. Department of Justice. Biden Hur Interview Transcript, October 8, 2023
3
Axios. Biden Hur Tape Special Counsel Audio
4
Politico. Audio of Hur Interview Reveals Biden’s Apparent Memory Stumbles
5
U.S. Department of Justice. Report From Special Counsel Robert K. Hur
6
BBC News. Biden Classified Documents Report Findings
7
PBS NewsHour. Biden Willfully Disclosed Classified Materials but No Criminal Charges Warranted
8
CBS News. Biden Hur Interview Tapes Special Counsel
9
NPR. Biden Classified Documents Investigation
10
PBS NewsHour. Biden Classified Documents Special Counsel Testifies in House Hearing
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ABC News. Biden Asserts Executive Privilege Over Audio Interview With Special Counsel
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PBS NewsHour. House Prepares Vote on Holding Garland in Contempt of Congress for Biden Audio
13
Maryland Matters. House GOP Votes to Hold Attorney General in Contempt in Audio Recording Dispute
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BBC News. Biden Hur Audio Recordings
15
Politico. Joe Biden Audio Tapes Release
16
NPR. Biden Sues DOJ
17
The Guardian. Biden Sues Justice Department Over Robert Hur Recordings
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BBC News. Biden Sues to Block Release of Audio Recordings
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USA Today. Court Orders DOJ to Turn Over Biden Memoir Tapes to Heritage
20
The Baltimore Sun. Former U.S. Attorney: Judge’s Ruling in Biden Audio Case Likely to Be Upheld
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U.S. Congress. House Judiciary Committee Document on Zwonitzer Investigation