Days after he announced he would not seek a second term, the Department of Justice is now saying that it has found transcripts of interviews between President Biden and his biographer — materials that the DOJ previously denied having — which were used in the investigation into Mr. Biden’s handling of classified materials by special counsel Robert Hur. 

The Justice Department told a federal judge late Monday that “in the past few days” they had located “six electronic files, consisting of a total of 117 pages, that appeared to be verbatim transcripts of a small subset” of recorded conversations between Mr. Biden and his ghost writer, Mark Zwonitzer.

Details of the filing were first reported by Politico.

The discovery comes a month after a DOJ lawyer told a judge that processing the audio files — which included 70 hours of material — and scanning for potential classified information would be an extremely tedious task. 

“We don’t have some transcript that’s been created by the special counsel that we can attest to its accuracy,” Justice Department lawyer Cameron Silverberg said during a June hearing in a lawsuit filed by the Heritage Foundation.

The transcripts in question are of talks between Mr. Biden and Mr. Zwonitzer while they were working on his 2007 and 2017 memoirs. 

The filing also showed that while the DOJ was handling multiple Freedom of Information Act requests related to Mr. Hur’s investigation, the department had contacted the former special counsel to get further information on which materials he used for portions of his report. 

The former special counsel told the DOJ that he relied on the audio clips between Mr. Biden and his biographer and notes written by Mr. Biden regarding an Afghanistan memo to write his report. 

In his report, Mr. Hur ultimately did not recommend criminal charges against Mr. Biden for his possession of classified materials after leaving office as vice president, referring to the President as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

The Department of Justice previously argued that releasing recordings of conversations between Mr. Biden and Mr. Hur would violate the president’s privacy and disincentivize future witnesses from agreeing to conduct recorded interviews. Mr. Biden ultimately invoked executive privilege to block House Republicans efforts to have the recordings released. 

The DOJ’s discovery comes just one day after Mr. Biden announced he would no longer seek reelection. It is not immediately obvious how his recusal will impact how the DOJ proceeds with the handling of the newly discovered audio clips.

Republicans in Congress expressed skepticism about the timing of the ‘discovery.’ In a social media post, Senator Hawley wrote, “Now that Biden’s not running, it’s AMAZING what info DOJ can cough up.”