In the leaked audio of the Biden-Hur interview published by Axios, then-President Biden was caught on air admitting to have kept classified documents about Afghanistan and the situation in it from his time as vice president as a memento, for “posterity’s sake,” when he left the White House.
As background, the interview between then-President Biden and Special Counsel Robert Hur occurred in 2023, shortly after President Biden was found to have improperly kept and handled classified information from his time as VP, with some of it even sitting in his garage. Despite that being the same crime that Jack Smith went on the warpath against Trump for, even raiding his Mar-a-Lago home, Biden was never charged.
Stunningly, the president even admitted to the crime in the interview with Hur, as the audio reveals. When Hur asked him about a classified document about Afghanistan found in the library of his lake house, Biden said, “I don’t know that I knew, but it wasn’t something I would have stopped to think about.”
Continuing, then-President Biden started rambling about committing the crime for posterity, saying, “I guess I wanted to hang on to it for posterity’s sake. I mean, this was my position on Afghanistan. I’ve been of the view from a historical standpoint that there are certain points in history, world history, where fundamental things change using technology.”
Adding to that, he rambled nearly incoherently about things changing thanks to technology, with little relation of how that was connected to him stealing a document and keeping it at his lake house. He said, “So, there are a lot of things that I think are fundamentally changing how international societies function, and they relate a lot to technology.”
Biden then kept rambling, leading to Hur pushing him back on track as to why he had kept the classified document about Afghanistan. Biden said, referring to the desire to keep it for posterity, “No, I’m sorry, that’s why I wanted it.” He added, at that point, “It had nothing to with Afghanistan.”
Biden’s lawyers then chimed in, with one of them saying that, “For the purposes of a clean record,” he wanted to avoid “getting into speculative areas.” He then noted that Biden first said he had no idea why he had kept the document or how it ended up at his lake house. Hur, obviously frustrated, answered by saying, “I think we should take a break.”
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Listen to the disastrous interview segment here:
Axios commented on the clip in a post on X by saying, “EXCLUSIVE AUDIO: Biden’s reversal on classified document flusters his attorneys. After initially saying he didn’t recall why he had it in his home, he acknowledged ‘I guess I wanted to hang onto it just for posterity’s sake.'”
A commenter on that Axios post noted that the audio raises the question of who was actually in charge, saying, “We need investigations into who was making decisions in his White House, this confirms it wasn’t Joe. Was he even mentally competent to sign legislation? All of it needs to be reviewed.”