Almost four years before he was sworn in as president, Joe Biden showed numerous instances of apparent memory loss, recently released recordings show.
Recordings of Biden’s conversations with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer became available through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the Oversight Project, a watchdog group. The conversations took place on several occasions from October 2016 through April 2017.
On Feb. 16, 2017, just weeks after he left office as vice president, Biden discussed his consideration of a 2016 presidential run with Zwonitzer and noted what he would have said. Then he paused as he was seemingly reading.
“No one gets to the point in life I’ve gotten to without — I can’t read my own writing,” Biden said. “Enormous progress, Pres and I have done. I’m not going to stand by and see it undone.”
On April 24, 2017, just months after leaving the vice presidency, Biden struggled to remember the names of two Obama administration economic advisers.
“The guy at Princeton now. Economist. Good guy. Was our, our Chief Economic Advisor. Not Kaufman. I’ll think of his name,” Biden said to ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer.
“And the guy back at the University of Chicago with the funny name,” Biden said. “I’ll think of it in a second. I should write the names down because I keep forgetting them.”
Biden appeared to be referencing Alan Krueger, a Princeton professor, and Austan Goolsbee, of the University of Chicago, who served as chairmen of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
The Justice Department released the recordings, which were part of special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified information after his time as vice president and before he was sworn in as president. Hur opted not to bring charges, he explained in his 2024 report, in part because he thought a jury would see Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Also on April 24, 2017, Biden seemed to have trouble remembering the timeline of his terms in office.
“I was, during the month of, of November, working real hard on the — had we passed ACA?” Biden stopped. “We had, hadn’t we?”
The ghostwriter answered, “Yeah. That looks like ’13, 2013. … So that’s still a year early — too early for it.”
Biden said, “Right, so what am I thinking of here?”
The recordings are evidence that what appeared to be Biden’s mental decline was occurring years before he ran for president, said Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project. Yet Biden’s inner circle kept the matter quiet, he added.
“These tapes have so many pauses and ‘ums’ that it sounds like Biden is buffering like a dial-up Internet connection,” Howell said in a public statement. “The knowledge of his deterioration was well-established. The sin of the autopen administration is corporate and accountability should be had on all enablers.”
The Daily Signal reached out to the Office of Joe and Jill Biden for comment for this story, as well as to Creative Artists Agency, which represents Biden for public speaking.
A Biden spokesman told The Associated Press that the release of the recordings was the result of a weaponized Department of Justice.
“President Biden’s conversations for a book a decade ago that discussed his late son are private, and were provided to the Department of Justice on the express condition they stay that way,” Biden spokesman TJ Ducklo said. “Reversing course and making them public is just the latest example of this Administration weaponizing the DOJ for political retribution.”
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
