During an ongoing lawsuit aimed at forcing the Justice Department (DOJ) to produce records from Special Counsel Robert Hur’s probe into Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents before being elected president, the DOJ revealed the discovery of 117 pages of transcribed discussions between the president and his ghostwriter.
The find was highlighted Wednesday by the Oversight Project, a conservative government transparency watchdog that sued the DOJ.
The ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, was previously subject to a March subpoena from the House Judiciary Committee, which sought any and all documents, contracts and recordings of interviews and conversations with Biden.
However, Oversight Project counsel Kyle Brosnan said on Wednesday this particular revelation is both new and further animates the need for transparency in regard to questions about Biden’s competency.
Brosnan said that just prior to the Oversight Project’s last hearing on the matter, the Justice Department informed the court of the transcripts.
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“There do exist written transcripts of President Biden’s interviews with his ghostwriter where they discuss classified material, and that Special Counsel Hur relied upon those written transcripts in coming to his conclusions [that Biden was a ‘well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory’].”
The memoir Zwonitzer assisted with, “Promise Me, Dad,” was released in 2017.
“The discovery of those materials has been the subject of a lot of back-and-forth between us and the Justice Department about how we want to proceed,” Brosnan added.
“We’re trying to figure out how that discovery impacts the case and kind of what the next steps are there.”
According to a court filing obtained by Fox News Digital, Justice Department officials flagged the apparent discovery to the bench and plaintiff Mike Howell, Brosnan’s colleague and the executive director of the Oversight Project.
The officials wrote that in their prior June court appearance they attested that Hur’s office did not have a verbatim transcript of any Zwonitzer-Biden recordings.
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The DOJ then noted Howell’s team “questioned this representation” and pointed out a footnote in a document that supposedly suggested it was sourced from a transcript.
When the department could not reach anyone with knowledge of special counsel office files, they reached out directly to Hur, who confirmed the files were indeed transcripts of a subset of Zwonitzer-Biden recordings.
Brosnan confirmed negotiations with the DOJ are now ongoing as to how to handle the new tranche.
“There’s over 70 hours of tapes between Biden and Zwonitzer. So, that’s obviously a lot of material that’s going to take the Justice Department a long time to process,” he said.
As for his team’s larger legal beef with the DOJ – the exertion of executive privilege over the Hur tapes – Brosnan said one of the administration’s major claims appeares to be undermined by the former official they cited.
After Congress was given a transcript of the Hur-Biden interview, former Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s 2008 memo shielding White House interoffice communications was cited by the Biden administration as part of its executive privilege argument.
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However, Mukasey himself said in a June court filing that while he supports the tool of executive privilege, the Biden administration’s assertion is “flawed.”
“I believe the assertion of executive privilege made here goes well beyond the limits of any prior assertion and is not supported by the 2008 executive privilege letter.”
“The reasons given for invoking this privilege are entirely unconvincing,” Mukasey, who served under former President George W. Bush, wrote of Biden.
The Justice Department declined comment for the purposes of this story.
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