Audio of former special counsel Robert Hur’s interview with former President Joe Biden is out, showing the extent to which Biden struggled to recall simple facts.
The news outlet Axios obtained the audio of Hur’s interviews with Biden, which took place in October 2023. The recordings were taken over two three-hour interview sessions recorded on October 8 and 9.
In one audio clip, Biden struggles to recall the year his son Beau died. Beau died of brain cancer on May 30, 2015, at the age of 46. The audio shows that Biden could remember the month and day, but struggled to recall the year until he was prompted by members of the special counsel’s team.
Biden also gets the year wrong that President Donald Trump was elected to his first term. Biden confuses the year that Trump is elected, 2016, with the year that he enters office and Biden leaves the vice presidency, 2017. Biden is repeatedly prompted to clarify when he leaves office and Trump enters the White House.
As the clip continues, Biden backtracks, appears to repeat himself, and appears to misstate the year of Beau’s death again after being told the correct year. Biden struggles to spin more than a handful of words together at a time before he pauses again, appearing to be trying to recollect his thoughts. At several moments, Biden drops off midway through a sentence with a muttered, “anyway.”
Biden’s pauses are accentuated by the ticking of a grandfather clock in the background. Over stretches of time, Biden would pause every few words while the ticking of the clock would drone on in the background.
In the Hur report, the special counsel said that he decided against charging Biden for mishandling classified documents in part because Biden’s old age and memory problems would make him sympathetic to a jury.
“Mr. Biden’s memory was significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023,” the report said. “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
In a second audio clip published by Axios, the former president admits to holding classified material “for posterity’s sake.”
“I don’t know if it was going to be the subject of reporting, but I wanted to hang onto it, I guess I wanted to hang onto it just for posterity’s sake,” Biden told investigators of his reason for keeping a classified document on Afghanistan. “I mean, this was my position on Afghanistan.”
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