In newly released recordings of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s conversations with his ghostwriter from 2016 and 2017, Mr. Biden acknowledged that he had held onto classified materials from his vice presidency, for which he was later the subject of a special counsel’s investigation.
But the nearly three hours of tapes, released by a group established by the Heritage Foundation on Monday after a legal battle with Mr. Biden, reveal little that was not already documented in the special counsel’s report. The special counsel, Robert K. Hur, determined in 2024 that there was not sufficient evidence to charge Mr. Biden with a crime.
“I just found all the classified stuff downstairs,” Mr. Biden told his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, during a conversation in February 2017, as the two men were working on Mr. Biden’s memoir, “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship and Purpose.”
The tapes came into the Justice Department’s possession on a hard drive that Mr. Hur collected while investigating Mr. Biden for retaining classified materials from his vice presidency.
The group originally formed by the Heritage Foundation, called the Oversight Project, sought access to the tapes in a lawsuit after the department, then under Mr. Biden, declined to release them in response to a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration decided to hand over redacted versions of the tapes, prompting Mr. Biden to sue to block their release, citing privacy concerns. Last week, a federal appeals court ruled that the redactions, of which there are many, had satisfied Mr. Biden’s concerns about privacy, paving the way for the release of the tapes.
A spokesman for Mr. Biden did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.
During the February 2017 conversation in which Mr. Biden claimed to have located classified materials in his home, Mr. Biden also referred to a 2009 memo in which he argued against deploying more troops to Afghanistan to President Barack Obama.
Mr. Biden’s claim of having unearthed documents, as well as the details of that memo, appear in the early pages of Mr. Hur’s report as an example of how Mr. Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency.”
“Nevertheless, we do not believe this evidence is sufficient” to charge him, the report noted a couple of pages later.
Mr. Hur also said Mr. Biden presented “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” Those memory lapses are often evident in the tapes, in which Mr. Biden struggles to recall some names and several dates, prompting him to refer to records and notes to orient his recollections.
In one such exchange, which was documented verbatim in Mr. Hur’s report, Mr. Biden told Mr. Zwonitzer as they were reviewing papers that “some of this may be classified, so be careful, I’m not sure; it’s not marked classified.”
On several occasions, Mr. Biden also referred to high-level meetings with top defense and intelligence brass, or specific information that he was told by John O. Brennan, then the director of the C.I.A. But in most cases, the specifics of those exchanges are hidden by heavy redactions.
