CBS News98%
Early details on what's in the Joe Biden tapes that were just released after legal battle 86%
7/27/2026, 6:03:39 PM
BS Summary: This video contains 25 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Appeal to Authority, and Appeal to Emotion, with Anecdotal as the most egregious example at 26.4% saturation with 150 hits. Analysis detected 1,336 faulty-reasoning hits from 569 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 73.5% and a BS Rank of 86% (3,657 of 25,545 videos). This video is worse (more manipulative) than 85.70% of the video peer group.
Audio recordings that former President Biden fought for years to keep private have now been released.
The tapes were cited in a 2024 special counsel's report
which said Biden kept volumes of notes at his home that included classified information.
The roughly 70 hours of audio recordings were made while Biden worked with his ghostwriter on his 2017 memoir.
Recordings shared with CBS News include Biden describing potentially classified meetings.
investigative reporter and producer Josh Boswell joins us now.
What more do we know?
>> So, what we found is going through these large amounts of audio recordings is
that many instances where Joe Biden either at the end of the Obama administration when he was vice president or just afterwards in early 2017 is referring to classified material.
He's talking with his ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer and he's saying, you know, here's this meeting with the National Security Council.
Here's the details of what happened there. In in one instance he even says, "I just found some classified documents downstairs."
Joe Biden in these recordings is very explicit about knowing that this material is classified and then discussing it with this man who does not have a security clearance.
So, it's pretty interesting stuff.
This is material that was highlighted as you said in his report from 2024.
But, this is the first time that we're actually hearing Joe Biden saying it and it's pretty interesting stuff.
>> This was part of the investigation which her in his final report had said there was no likelihood or not enough likelihood of a conviction because the jury would find him too sympathetic and elderly.
Am I remembering that correctly?
>> Yeah, that's correct. So, although Hur believed that there was strong evidence of classified material that Biden was handling inappropriately, he believed that the jurors would would let him off and a of that was because Hur believed that Joe seemed to be kind of having declining mental faculties.
And that is not super clear from the recordings that we see here from 2017, but what you do get is an impression of a man who's struggling to remember certain facts from several years ago and comes off as affable, comes off as wanting to defend his record.
But certainly in the later 2023 interview that Robert Hur did with Biden, he concluded that the Biden was a man who would come off as an elderly person with a poor memory who a jury would sympathize with.
And that's why he declined to file charges.
>> Again, quickly just to stress the timeline here.
These recordings were taken when?
I see it one recording that was in February of 2017 in which he was having trouble remembering certain details.
>> That's right.
So, you know, some of the allegations in Hur's report are that
Biden was having trouble with his memory back then.
So, we're talking, you know, years before he even became president.
Um, listening to these recordings today, we haven't seen anything that's an absolute slam dunk of, you know, Biden was really struggling with mental faculties, but certainly there are moments where he seems confused, where he's struggling to remember things.
And
yeah, the period we're talking about here is recordings from 2016 and 2017.
>> Okay, Josh Boswell, thank you.
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.