The Department of Justice is compromised.
The DOJ just happened to find transcripts of conversations between President Joe Biden and a biographer that Special Counsel Robert Hur used in his investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents.
The left and the media scorched Hur for describing Biden as “a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
But the DOJ doesn’t have to keep Biden safe anymore because he’s out of the 2024 race.
Biden asserted executive privilege over the interview recordings.
The DOJ told a court it couldn’t comply with the Freedom of Information Act requests because “it would be highly time-consuming to process other audio files containing Biden’s interviews with writer Marl Zwonitzer.”
On June 18, lawyer Cameron Silverberg told the court, “We don’t have some transcript that’s been created by the special counsel that we can attest to its accuracy.”
A month later…
In the past few days, in the course of processing the portions of the Biden Zwonitzer audio recordings that the parties agreed to (see June 25, 2024 Joint Status Report at 2-3, ECF No. 20), 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. Having learned about the transcripts, the Department planned to contact an individual with knowledge of the SCO files with whom the Department had previously consulted. However, the individual was out of the office and unavailable. Accordingly, the Department contacted Robert Hur to ask about the nature of the transcripts. Mr. Hur confirmed that the identified files were in fact transcripts of a subset of the BidenZwonitzer audio recordings, created by a court-reporting service at the SCO’s request. These transcripts were indeed the transcripts referred to in the Hur Report, though they were not cited in any of the Passages in Plaintiffs’ FOIA request.
GUESS WHAT. The DOJ also found a way to contact Hur directly:
Having contacted Mr. Hur to gather information about the transcripts, the Department concluded that it was appropriate under the circumstances to ask him what records he relied upon for the highlighted statements in Plaintiffs’ FOIA request. Mr. Hur identified two records that he relied upon in addition to those already identified by the Department: (1) the newly-located, verbatim transcripts of the Biden-Zwonitzer audio prepared by a court-reporting service at the SCO’s request, and (2) with respect to the Afghanistan memo—a memo that the Department previously identified as responsive, and that Plaintiffs agreed to scope out of their request—a specific portion of Mr. Biden’s handwritten notebook related to the memo. See June 16, 2024 Joint Status Report at 2, ECF No. 14. Mr. Hur also confirmed that, in making the statements highlighted in Plaintiff’s FOIA request that drew conclusions about the Biden-Zwonitzer audio recordings, he had relied on the Biden-Zwonitzer audio recordings generally.
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