The Department of Justice admitted to a federal judge on Monday that it has located 117 pages of transcripts it previously denied having, related to President Joe Biden's interviews with a biographer which played a role in the recently completed criminal investigation of his handling of classified material before he became president.
The investigation from special counsel Robert Hur found concluded that while Biden likely mishandled classified info, no reasonable prosecutor would bring charges against him for coming off as "a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."
What followed was a flood of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from news organizations and conservative groups seeking information - including audio recordings of Biden's interviews with Hur - which the DOJ refuses to release over fears that they could be used to create 'deepfakes' of the president. The groups, meanwhile, maintain that the DOJ is covering up Biden's severe cognitive decline.
It’s unclear whether his exit from the race will affect the handling of Hur’s materials by the Justice Department, which has argued that the release of audio of Biden’s interviews with Hur would violate the president’s privacy, lead to potential abuse — such as deepfakes — and deter other witnesses from agreeing to recorded interviews. Biden asserted executive privilege over the audio recordings of his interviews in a bid to head off House Republicans’ effort to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to release the recordings. -Politico
At one hearing last month, the DOJ told US District Judge Dabney Friedrich that it would be 'highly time-consuming' to process other audio files containing Biden's interviews with biographer Mark Zwonitzer, which apparently consist of some 70 hours of recordings that the DOJ says is far more difficult to review and process than written material.
"We don’t have some transcript that’s been created by the special counsel that we can attest to its accuracy," said DOJ attorney Cameron Silverberg in a June 18 hearing in front of Friedrich, in a suit brought by the Heritage Foundation, Politico reports.
On Monday, however, Silverberg admitted in the Monday filing that the department had "in the past few days" confirmed that Hur's office had created transcripts of Biden's discussions with Zwonitzer for memoirs published in 2007 and 2017.
Hur's team determined that some of those conversations contained classified information, however the DOJ barred prosecutors from pursuing charges against a sitting president.
"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," reads the new filing.