Former US President Joe Biden appeared to discuss sensitive information and describe possessing classified documents in audio recordings made in 2016 and 2017, which were released on Monday, July 28th, 2026, by the Oversight Project, a conservative activist group. These recordings were created while Biden was collaborating with a ghostwriter on his 2017 memoir, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose.

In one recording from October 2016, near the end of Biden’s second term as vice president under President Barack Obama, Biden spoke about extensive notes he kept during his time in office, stating, “There was a lot of stuff going on at the same time in foreign policy. You didn’t want to go into it, but I have extensive notes … over this period of time.” Another recording from February 16th, 2017, about a month after Biden left office, includes Biden telling the ghostwriter about a “long meeting on the security council on – and part of it’s classified.” He also mentioned writing a handwritten 40-page memorandum to the President arguing against deploying additional troops to Afghanistan, reasoning that the day US forces left would be like the day before they arrived.

No classified material was alleged to have appeared in Biden’s memoir. However, the recordings show Biden sometimes struggling to recall details or dates, which led the Oversight Project and some conservative media outlets to suggest he was demonstrating cognitive decline prior to his presidential run.

But Hur, an official involved in reviewing the matter, described Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and noted that Biden’s memory was “significantly limited” during the recorded interviews in 2017 and a 2023 interview. Hur ultimately decided that no criminal charges were warranted, citing the difficulty of proving a felony requiring willfulness for a former president in his 80s.

Sources