For much of his time in the White House, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. offered a quick rebuttal to those raising concerns about his age: “Watch me,” he said.
Yet, in the end, it may be the sound of Mr. Biden’s own voice that proves what his aides worked furiously, and spent hundreds of millions of campaign dollars, to try to keep the public from seeing with its own eyes.
The five-hour-and-10-minute audio recording of a special counsel’s interview with Mr. Biden on Oct. 8 and 9, 2023, shows a president struggling to recall dates and details, whose thoughts seem jumbled as he tries to recreate events that had occurred just a few years earlier.
The information in the audio recording, which Axios published on Saturday, is not new. The 258-page transcript of the interview of Mr. Biden by Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated his handling of classified documents, was released in March 2024. His report set off a political firestorm in the midst of the president’s re-election campaign.
But the sound of Mr. Biden’s fragile voice and unsteady responses offers a revelation of its own. The Hur tapes reveal the president exactly as a majority of Americans believed him to be — and as Democrats repeatedly insisted he was not.
In the days after Mr. Hur released his report, Democrats fanned out across the news media to vouch for the president, assuring the public of their eyewitness vantage point on his deep knowledge and sure-handed command of the nation and the world. He was “sharp” and at the “top of his game,” they said almost in unison. He was “focused, impressive, formidable and effective,” as Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, one of the youngest leading Democrats, put it memorably. Biden administration officials declined to release the audio recording of his interview, asserting executive privilege.
But behind the closed doors of the White House’s map room, where Mr. Biden answered Mr. Hur’s patient queries over the beat of a ticking grandfather clock, the former president offers responses that trail off midsentence and jumbled thoughts that appear unrelated to the question. There are pauses as he struggles for details and extended digressions on the moldings in his home, the importance of Gutenberg’s printing press and the storage of his prized Corvette.
In the audio recording, Mr. Hur’s conclusion — that a jury would see Mr. Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” — is not merely valid, it is irrefutable.
“Well, if it was 2013 — when did I stop being vice president?” Mr. Biden wonders in a weakened voice, when asked by Mr. Hur to identify papers stored in the home he rented after he left office in 2017. “They didn’t get to Wilmington until 2022 or something, right? Or 20-whatever. I don’t know.”
For Democrats, the audio recording’s release puts party leaders in the uncomfortable position of having to reconcile the man heard in Mr. Hur’s interview with the forceful president they described in response to their voters’ insistent questions.
For months after the election, Democrats hoped to avoid the questions of what they knew and when about Mr. Biden’s fitness to serve a second term. Hearing the recording may further a kind of truth-and-reconciliation moment for a party that has only begun to let go of its denials.
It does not take much for Mr. Hur to uncover what Democrats had tried so hard to conceal.
At first, Mr. Biden sounds fairly capable. He describes the binders packed with classified and unclassified information that he read through during his eight years as vice president. And he discusses his goals after leaving that office in 2017, including his desire to remain involved with “consequential” foreign policy matters and cancer research.
Then, about an hour into the recording, Mr. Biden’s answers take a sharp turn.
A simple question about the documents that were stored at the Naval Observatory elicits an 11-minute response. It begins with a young Mr. Biden winning an international tort competition in law school, winds through an early legal case involving a 23-year-old man who lost part of his penis in an oil-refinery accident and concludes with Mr. Biden winning a seat on the New Castle, Del., County Council in 1970.
Again and again, Mr. Biden answers the prosecutor not as someone under federal investigation but as an aging politician recounting his life story for posterity.
Like many people as they age, Mr. Biden remains himself. He cracks jokes about his wife looking hot in a bikini and about how he is still a “young man.” He displays the flashes of ego and self-aggrandizement that have been staples of his political career, boasting about “fundamentally changing” the nation’s strategic position in the Indo-Pacific. And he luxuriates in his own long-winded stories about his political influence, describing being handed an archer’s bow by the leader of Mongolia and nonchalantly shooting a bull’s-eye.
But now, the details elude him.
Mr. Biden’s lawyers step in to supply the date when his son Beau died — an event that devastated the former president and defined his final years in public life. They remind Mr. Biden of the year that he left the vice president’s office and Donald J. Trump was first inaugurated as president.
“This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?” Mr. Biden asks Mr. Hur, in response to a question about where Mr. Biden had stored his papers after leaving the vice presidency. “My son is either been deployed or is dying.”
Beau Biden deployed to Iraq in 2008. He died in 2015, when Mr. Biden was still vice president.
For his part, Mr. Hur is generous and professional, hardly the political villain that the White House made him out to be after his report was released. He gently and repeatedly tries to refocus the president on the storage of his classified documents.
At times, he sounds almost like a grandson trying to get accurate information from an elderly relative, trying to prompt his memory with photos and reminders of the timeline.
And even so, there is so much that Mr. Biden can no longer recall.
From the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office to Air Force One, the American presidency is cloaked in the symbolism of power and authority. In his halting voice, Mr. Biden cannot command the details of his move from the 72-acre, fortified grounds of the Naval Observatory to a rental home in Northern Virginia.
He cannot recall who unpacked his boxes or arranged his belongings there. He does not know how his belongings were organized, what papers were preserved or precisely which staff members made those decisions. He draws a blank when asked about loading some of his personal belongings into Steve Ricchetti’s minivan, after his long-serving aide offered to help him move.
“Is that how the stuff got in the garage?” he asks Mr. Hur at one point. “There was stuff one day. I came home, and all of it was on the garage floor. This was later, though.”
With his final campaign and his four years in the White House now behind him, Mr. Biden has plenty of time to uncover what, exactly, is in his “beat-up box” in the garage.
It is left to Democrats to sift through all the baggage the former president left behind.
Lisa Lerer is a national political reporter for The Times, based in New York. She has covered American politics for nearly two decades.
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