Audio Of Hur Interview Reveals Biden’s Apparent Memory Stumbles, Sparking Renewed Scrutiny

Newly released audio recordings of then-President Joe Biden’s 2023 interview with special counsel Robert Hur show Biden struggling to recount key events in his personal and political life, reigniting the debate about his cognitive capacity in the latter part of his presidency.

In audio posted in full by the news site Axios, Biden can be heard faltering while answering the special counsel’s questions, speaking softly and slowly between long, drawn-out pauses. His halting voice, often not above a mumble, competes with a loud ticking clock that overpowers the silence during delays in his speech.

At times, members of the then-president’s team or Hur’s team can be heard jumping in to prompt his memory with certain details.

Apparently forgetting when his son Beau died, Biden referred to the time frame of his passing as sometime between 2017 and 2018.

“What month did Beau die? Oh God, May 30th …” Biden can be heard saying, before his staff members jump in to add the year was 2015.

“Was it 2015 he had died?” Biden replied.

After the interview transcripts were released last year by the House Judiciary committee, Biden was furious that he was asked about his son’s death. “How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden said at the time. But both the audio and transcript reflect that he brought up Beau Biden’s passing on his own.

His son’s death wasn’t the only key date Biden appeared to be hazy on. After initially saying that President Donald Trump was first elected in 2017, Biden’s staff can be heard quickly jumping in to correct the year to 2016.

The audio recordings were part of an investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents. Asked about the potential documents in his possession following his vice presidency, Biden could not remember which documents he had kept — telling the special counsel that “I don’t know that I knew” that he had held onto an Afghanistan memo found in one of his notebooks.

“I guess I wanted to hold on to it just for posterity’s sake,” Biden later added, acknowledging that he may have kept the classified document.

The prosecutors pressed him on the documents and whether he told others where to find them in his home. Repeatedly throughout the interview, Biden said “I don’t remember” before then saying that he “may have” told someone about the memos.

At another point in the audio recordings released by Axios, Biden stumbled through a long aside about how he ended up doing archery with the Mongolian prime minister — a segment of his answers to Hur’s questions about his home and where the classified documents might have been stored.

The interviews with Hur became central to a broader debate about the president’s mental acuity in the second part of his administration that eventually saw Biden stepping aside from the 2024 presidential election.

In a statement to POLITICO, Biden spokesperson Kelly Scully brushed off the newly released tapes.

“The transcripts were released by the Biden administration more than a year ago. The audio does nothing but confirm what is already public,” Scully said.

While the transcripts of the audio were released over a year ago, the recordings of the interview reveal the extent of the difficulty then-President Biden exhibited in recalling and describing events.

While Hur declined to recommend charges against Biden, his descriptions of the president in a 345-page report painted a harsh picture of Biden’s mental state. Biden would present to a jury as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur said at the time.

The Biden administration asserted executive privilege to block the release of the tapes last year.

Republicans, who had long accused Biden of mental lapses, were quick to claim that the audio recordings were evidence of the former president's slump, casting Biden's stumbling as even worse than they had previously thought.

"We all knew that President Biden suffered from severe mental decline during his presidency," said Mike Davis, a GOP lawyer and close Trump ally. "But the Hur tapes make clear it was much, much worse than the American people knew. The Biden White House and its Cabinet engaged in the biggest cover-up and scandal in American political history by hiding this."

Many Republicans blasted Democrats for protecting Biden and accused them of refusing to address concerns about his age — an issue that is already confronting Democrats ahead of the 2028 presidential campaign. Other Republicans opened the door to investigating how the Biden administration was run in its waning months — with Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chair of the House Oversight Committee, saying he would bring in Biden’s senior staff for interviews.

“Democrats told you over and over that Joe Biden was ‘sharp,’” Comer wrote on X. “The cover-up of Joe’s mental decline is a scandal of historic proportions.”

Adam Wren contributed to this report.