White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told Daily Caller White House Correspondent Reagan Reese on Wednesday that Americans would be “quite interested” to hear the long-buried audio of former President Joe Biden’s interview with former special counsel Robert Hur.
“I don’t have an update on that but I can certainly check,” Leavitt told Reese during Wednesday’s White House press briefing before adding “I think the American people would be quite interested to hear that tape.”
Daily Caller White House Correspondent @reaganreese_: “Is the White House considering releasing the audio of Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur to the public, which [Biden] had previously blocked?”
LEAVITT: “I think the American people would be quite interested to… pic.twitter.com/JnBgtIKHry
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 8, 2025
Biden’s Justice Department appointed Hur in 2023 to investigate the former president’s handling of certain classified documents. Despite concluding that Biden willfully retained classified national security documents, Hur declined to charge Biden criminally.
The former special counsel declined to press charges against the then-sitting president and noted in his report that Biden presented himself “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
“Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness,” Hur wrote.
Biden’s DOJ repeatedly stonewalled Congress and the media in their attempts to access the tapes.
House Republicans demanded that the DOJ turn over an audio recording, prompting a refusal in early April 2024. (RELATED: House Votes Down GOP Effort To Fine Merrick Garland For Withholding Biden-Hur Tapes)
The DOJ reportedly rejected Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for a recording from multiple entities, prompting several to file a lawsuit in July. A CNN-led collection of media outlets, including The Associated Press and Reuters, joined the suit.
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