Biden Recordings Show Memory Lapses, Candid Obama Criticism

Former President Joe Biden, left, and former First Lady Jill Biden during the opening of the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago on June 18, 2026. Photo by Mustafa Hussain /Photographer: Mustafa Hussain/Bl

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(Bloomberg) — Recordings of former President Joe Biden speaking with his ghostwriter reveal occasional memory gaps amid detailed discussions of foreign policy — and some candid criticism of two-time running mate Barack Obama over his ties to Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

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“Between you and me,” Biden told ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer in April 2017, Obama “always got to the right spot, but a day late and a dollar short.” Biden, speaking in the context of Obama’s reluctance to impose sanctions on China, added a qualifier: “Maybe if I were president I would’ve not had the nerve to do it, too.”

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The recordings, released Monday by a Heritage Foundation advocacy group following a two-year court battle, capture Biden in six sessions between October 2016 and April 2017, as he was finishing his tenure as vice president and beginning work on his memoir. The transcripts run 117 pages and are heavily redacted.

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For the most part, Biden speaks with precision and detail — recalling specific phone calls with foreign leaders years earlier, the mechanics of Ukrainian energy subsidies, and the internal politics of the Obama White House. But in at least two moments, he loses his train of thought mid-conversation.

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Redacted Transcripts

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“What was I going to ask you?” Biden says in one session. “Oh, gosh. I, I can’t think of what it is.” In an earlier session, he pauses while recounting a meeting and says, “What was I talking about there?”

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Such moments would later lead Robert Hur, the special counsel investigating Biden’s handling of classified information, to cite  “diminished faculties and faulty memory” in his decision not to prosecute.

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“Mr. Biden’s recorded conversations with Zwonitzer from 2017 are often painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries,” Hur wrote in his final report. 

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In one exchange, Biden warned Zwonitzer that some material he was about to share “may be classified” and that it was “not marked classified” before continuing to discuss it. Some parts of the transcripts were redacted for national security reasons. 

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“Biden clearly gives away secret after secret to someone not authorized to hold such secrets,” said Jeff Clark, a former Trump administration official whose lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act led to the release of the tapes. “Now you know why Biden’s lawyers fought so hard to keep these tapes and transcripts out of the public’s watchful eye!”

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In a statement, Biden spokesman TJ Ducklo said the conversations “are private, and were provided to the Department of Justice on the express condition they stay that way. Reversing course and making them public is just the latest example of this Administration weaponizing the DOJ for political retribution.”

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The recordings also show Biden offering unusually blunt assessments of President Obama’s leadership, particularly on economic policy. Biden argued the administration had been too deferential to Wall Street and too cautious about confronting China over intellectual property theft.