DOJ ‘finds’ transcripts of Biden’s interviews with biographer after previous denial

According to Politico, DOJ lawyers involved in a Freedom of Information case launched after Hur’s report on Biden’s retention of classified documents told US District Judge Dabney Friedrich that it would be time-consuming to process the audio files that contained Biden’s interviews with Mark Zwonitzer, with 70 hours of those recordings existing, the attorneys said. They added in the hearing that reviewing audio for classified materials is more difficult than scanning written materials.

"We don’t have some transcript that’s been created by the special counsel that we can attest to its accuracy,” Justice Department lawyer Cameron Silverberg told Friedrich.

In a Monday court filing, however, Silverberg said that the department confirmed "in the past few days" that Hur’s office had transcripts made of a portion of the discussion with Zwonitzer. Prosecutors said that the discussion contained some classified information.

“In the past few days…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 SCO by a court-reporting service,” Silverberg wrote in the filing.

Hur’s report, released in February, said that he would not be recommending criminal charges against Biden for possessing classified materials after his vice president. Some of the documents were found in his Delaware home while others were found in a DC office. In Hur’s report, he called Biden a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."

"Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone from whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him – by then a former president well into his eighties – of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness," Hur wrote in his report.

The White House in May asserted executive privilege over audio and video recordings from Hur’s investigation. Congress has attempted to get these recordings from Attorney General Merrick Garland. Biden dropped out of the presidential race on Sunday.