A four-minute audio clip of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2023 special counsel interview released Friday evening showed Mr. Biden speaking softly and haltingly as he struggled to recall key dates.
The audio was published by Axios as the Trump administration made plans to release the full interview recording. It offers a firsthand look at Mr. Biden’s much-debated interview with Robert K. Hur, the special counsel, as part of an investigation into Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents.
The clip showed Mr. Biden stumbling over the years his son died and Donald J. Trump was first elected, and when he left office as vice president.
A transcript of the interview was released in 2024, when Mr. Hur released his report and declined to recommend charges against Mr. Biden. The Biden administration blocked the release of the audio recordings, which show Mr. Biden’s verbal and memory struggles.
As early as next week, the Trump administration plans to release the audio recordings of the interview, according to people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Biden was interviewed at the White House in October 2023 by Robert K. Hur, who had been appointed to investigate whether crimes had been committed related to classified documents found at Mr. Biden’s former office and home after he left the Obama administration.
In 2024, Mr. Hur announced he would not seek to file any charges in the case, in part because Mr. Biden would probably appear to be a sympathetic figure to a jury — an older man with a poor memory.
The emergence of the recording comes as Democrats are grappling with new revelations about Mr. Biden’s health while in office, and efforts at that time by his aides and other party leaders to quash concerns about his ability to run for re-election.
About a month after Mr. Hur’s announcement not to seek charges, officials released a transcript of his interview with Mr. Biden. But for more than a year, Republicans have been demanding that the government also release the audio recording, arguing that it might offer evidence of a decline in Mr. Biden’s mental acuity.
“The transcripts were released by the Biden administration more than a year ago,” said Kelly Scully, a spokeswoman for the former president. “The audio does nothing but confirm what is already public.”
The Biden administration did not release the audio, asserting executive privilege. Officials also said releasing such a recording could make it harder for prosecutors to get cooperation from witnesses in future investigations.
Officials at the Trump White House and Justice Department have disagreed with those Biden-era arguments and plan to release the audio, according to two people familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe a decision that has yet to be announced.
The Trump administration was facing a court deadline next week to take a position in a lawsuit over the recording.
Mr. Hur issued a 345-page report last year concluding that Mr. Biden had carelessly kept classified documents and notebooks at his home, but said that the evidence was not strong enough to charge the president with a crime.
The report’s most significant political impact, however, was its description of Mr. Biden as “an elderly man with a poor memory,” prompting a backlash from Democrats and a flurry of demands from Republicans for more details about the Mr. Biden’s purported limitations.
One particularly explosive detail was Mr. Biden’s struggle to remember the year in which his son Beau died.
“How in the hell dare he raise that,” Mr. Biden said after the report’s release. “I don’t need anyone to remind me when he passed away.”
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
Tyler Pager is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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