NEW: Hur Tapes Released — And It’s Worse Than You Imagined; UPDATE: Receipts — And a Question

Good Lord.

Just remember when you listen to these tapes of Joe Biden’s deposition with Special Counsel Robert Hur’s investigators, courtesy of Axios, when these interrogatories took place. Biden got deposed in October 2023, three months before the Democrat primaries began. The White House still claimed that the man you hear on these tapes was Sharp As A Tack® and Ran Rings Around Aides Half His Age. It was still several months before the White House and the media claimed videos that depicted Biden in the very same state were “cheap fakes,” but right in the middle of a four-year campaign by the Protection Racket Media to silence anyone who dared question Biden’s cognitive status. 

Even Axios sounds horrified by the reality of these audio tapes, and notes just how hard the Biden administration worked to keep them under wraps after Hur’s report in February 2024. 

Amid long, uncomfortable pauses, Joe Biden struggled to recall when his son died, when he left office as vice president, what year Donald Trump was elected or why he had classified documents he shouldn’t have had, according to audio Axios obtained of his October 2023 interviews with special counsel Robert Hur.

Why it matters: The newly released recordings of Biden having trouble recalling such details — while occasionally slurring words and muttering — shed light on why his White House refused to release the recordings last year, as questions mounted about his mental acuity. … 

The audio shows what the transcript lacks — the president’s dry-whisper voice and the long silences as he struggles to find the right words or dates. Those often were supplied by his attorneys, who acted as caretakers of his memory.

Just how bad could it be? Bad, man, really really bad. Axios’ Marc Caputo and Alex Thompson point to this exchange first, noticing that the grandfather clock in the White House Map Room keeps ticking away the seconds between fragments of thoughts Biden is trying to verbalize. Here’s that sequence:

The second clip isn’t quite as disjointed, but it’s not much better. For one thing, Biden actually admitted to the intent to retain one classified document relating to his position on Afghanistan, which might have triggered charges by admitting a mens rea to violate the law. But Biden then went off on a disjointed tangent on technology and other topics, at the end of which his attorney appears to attempt to stuff that genie back in the bottle:

Caputo and Thompson then open up yet another can of worms for Democrats by reminding readers of how they all rushed to condemn Hur for what turned out to be a generous assessment of Biden’s cognitive status:

Biden’s defenders included then-Vice President Harris, who blasted Hur’s report and called his comments about Biden’s age “gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate.”

• “The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong on the facts and clearly politically motivated —gratuitous,” Harris said then. “…. We should expect that there would be a higher level of integrity than what we saw.”

And perhaps more uncomfortably for Thompson, his current co-author Jake Tapper had Adam Schiff come on-air to accuse Hur of trying to “politically slime” Biden:

.@AdamSchiff: Robert Hur chose to “politically slime” Biden. Watch the full interview here: https://t.co/OYRx9a7Kkr pic.twitter.com/PXRsqKnzg8

— The Lead CNN (@TheLeadCNN) March 12, 2024

In fairness to Tapper, he does push back a bit on Schiff’s attack to start, noting that the transcript itself looked as though Biden had trouble keeping up with the conversation. But CNN and other outlets provided very little pushback to the claims that Hur had politicized his report and slandered Biden in his determination that Biden wasn’t really competent to stand trial — even if Hur went out of his way to say that in the most ambiguous way possible.

And this was from October 2023, not June 2024. The deposition took place over three days as well, and not at night but during what one would assume would be normal business hours at the White House. Biden clearly wasn’t even competent enough to handle a deposition at this point, let alone conduct the affairs of state as the nation’s chief executive. Biden’s lawyers certainly knew it, as they repeatedly had to remind Biden of basic facts, such as when his son Beau died and when Biden was in office. There is no possible way that Biden’s family and staff could not have known about this. There is no way that Democrat leadership didn’t know about this at that time anyway. 

And they tried to foist Biden off as fit for office at that moment — as well as for another four years. And they cooked the primary process in order to hide the truth from the American electorate.  This demands accountability from everyone involved — and that includes the American media establishment that ran interference for Biden, attacked those who demanded answers, and now want to profit off of their new Now It Can Be Told self-serving spin that they were victims of the cover-up rather than co-conspirators. 

Update: Here are a few more receipts getting passed around X/Twitter. Res ipsa loquitur. 

100% exoneration of Hur. Every person around Biden KNEW Hur was correct and they attacked & impugned his integrity anyway, entirely due to politics. Go read their quotes at the time, then listen to the audio. The discrepancy PERMANENTLY impeaches their veracity & credibility.

— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) May 17, 2025

@SymoneDSanders @MichaelSteele @AliciaMenendez : Symone tweeted “stand in your truth beloveds” today re Biden issue.
THIS? 👇 Let see if y’all can apologize after this truth re Robert Hur. https://t.co/baXDW1ILit

— judy (@judy060709) May 17, 2025

You can safely assume that if @JoeNBC doesn’t revisit this on Monday, offering a mea culpa for being complicit in the Democratic Big Lie, the cover-up continues – protecting media now instead of protecting Biden/Harris. https://t.co/9Un6KJHjfe

— Duane Patterson (@Radioblogger) May 17, 2025

and remember how the media fought to cover up Hur’s findings about Biden. https://t.co/TxmhzdoJWx pic.twitter.com/kUsBGpCTN7

— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) May 16, 2025

Reminder: Senator @ChrisMurphyCT called the Hur report a “partisan hit job” and defended Biden’s mental health immediately after the report came out https://t.co/vMRK3AJOB7 pic.twitter.com/LjZ3AoVUpD

— John Hasson (@SonofHas) May 17, 2025

Hypocrite ✏️ neck Adam Schiff made sure that Biden’s Hur report wasn’t released->
But demanded that Trump’s Jack Smith report be released->https://t.co/x7WxnVIUGj

— Rhonda (@Rhonda69838780) May 17, 2025

Would you care to revise your bull sh** story here @jonfavs #Biden #Hur https://t.co/Np5v8ju1lQ

— Thats O’Neill with two L’s (@carlphx1) May 17, 2025

@TVietor08 : ……”was not true”. Apology coming from you and @weijia I assume. There’s a tweet out there with your names on it. Biden’s condition is sad, not his fault.
Hur was eviscerated for being honest, as he was supposed to be in that assignment. https://t.co/hmbEOQKue0

— judy (@judy060709) May 17, 2025

The audio of the Hur/Biden interview made a jackass out of Raskin https://t.co/Mm4fi1LYAP

— SCW (@SCWOFTX) May 17, 2025

Update: We’ll be watching for explanations from all of the above, although we won’t hold our breath while doing so. While this obviously raises questions about who was actually running the White House at this point, today’s leak raises another: who gave the tapes to Axios? The Department of Justice had been planning to publicly release them, of course, but Axios didn’t credit the DoJ. If Pam Bondi had released them, one would think she would have held a press conference explaining that decision and making some strong arguments about the media. 

The timing is certainly curious, too. This is basically a Friday night news dump technique, which is normally deployed to bury bad news over a weekend to keep it from becoming a bigger headache. Who benefits from that strategy in this case? The Bidens, perhaps, but none of them will be running for office, and I seriously doubt that any of them have this much strategic sense. Democrats may be hoping to get past the Biden-senility deathtrap they set for themselves, but that question isn’t going away any time soon — and ripping the Band-Aid off the Hur tapes isn’t going to decrease interest in it. Just the opposite, in fact. 

So cui bono? One has to wonder whether Hur himself or his investigators might have grown tired of the Democrats’ attempts to claim that they never saw Biden slow down until the June 2024 debate. But why wait until a Friday afternoon to do so? There doesn’t seem to be a good fit for the circumstances among any of the parties involved. Still, the only people with access to these tapes would presumably be the DoJ, Hur’s team, and the Bidens’ attorneys, at most. Hmmmm.