Another conspiracy theory just graduated to established fact. This week, the Oversight Project, the investigative arm of the Heritage Foundation, released nearly 70 hours of audio between then-private-citizen Joe Biden and his ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer, recorded in 2016 and 2017 for the memoir “Promise Me, Dad.” The tapes arrived after a two-year legal fight that Biden's own lawyers lost, and they answer a question the Democratic Party spent years lying to your face about: did the former president knowingly handle classified material after leaving the vice presidency? I have spent 30 years advising fiduciaries and testifying as an expert witness in federal and state courts. Juries pay me to explain the difference between a mistake and a pattern. What I hear on these tapes is a pattern, and what I've watched for two years is a party and a press corps that knew it.
Start with Biden's own words. On the recordings, he can be heard warning his ghostwriter about the material in front of him, telling him at one point, “Some of this may be classified. So, be careful.” At another point, he tells Zwonitzer, “They didn't even know I had this,” while walking through notebooks from his vice-presidential years. That lines up almost word for word with what Special Counsel Robert Hur documented in his February 2024 report: willful retention and disclosure of classified material, unsecured storage in a home garage, notebook entries read nearly verbatim to a civilian ghostwriter. Hur declined to charge him, in part because he expected a jury to see a sympathetic old man with a bad memory rather than a calculated leaker. Fine. But faulty recall of dates is not the same thing as knowingly showing a ghostwriter material you yourself just labeled classified. One is decline. The other is a decision, and the tape proves he made it.
Here's the part that should really make you angry: the Democratic political machine and its allies in the press knew exactly what these tapes would show, and they spent two years running interference anyway. The White House and a chorus of friendly commentators insisted Biden was “sharp as a tack,” dismissed unflattering videos as manipulated clips, and treated anyone who raised the Hur report as a Republican operative. That fiction survived exactly until the June 27, 2024 debate, when tens of millions of viewers watched him lose his train of thought live on air, and the machine that had spent years vouching for his acuity spent the following weeks quietly maneuvering him off the ticket it had just renominated him to lead. Bari Weiss called it a reckoning for “an entire class of experts, journalists, and pundits” who had sold the country a man who didn't exist. That's not spin. That's a coordinated cover-up by people who knew better and calculated the party mattered more than the truth. The tapes are simply the receipts arriving late.
The double standard doesn't stop with the press. The Justice Department spent years and real tax money prosecuting other officials' document handling while sitting on audio of Biden doing something similar. When Trump's Mar-a-Lago documents case was in the headlines, Biden told a national television audience that mishandling classified material was totally irresponsible, while his own team negotiated with prosecutors over boxes in his garage. I have built a career on one principle: the standard you apply to yourself has to be at least as tough as the standard you apply to everyone else. Washington has never operated that way, and neither, it turns out, has the press that's supposed to hold it accountable.
To be fair to Biden's defenders, a man in visible cognitive decline in 2017 doesn't carry the same culpability as someone deliberately smuggling secrets for profit or espionage, and Hur made that same point. But sympathy for diminished capacity is not a defense for the machine that spent two years flatly denying he shared anything classified with anyone, ghostwriter included. You don't get to plead total innocence and diminished capacity in the same breath. Pick one and prepare to answer for whichever one you pick.
There's a fix here, and it has nothing to do with prosecuting an 83-year-old diminished man. Congress needs a records management statute with teeth: mandatory, audited returns of classified material within a fixed window after leaving office, with real penalties regardless of which party holds the Justice Department that year. Right now, the outcome depends entirely on who's in charge, and that's how the same fact pattern produces two different verdicts. Fix the incentive, and the political machine loses its favorite excuse.
The tapes are out. The denials are on record. And the next time the same party and the same press tell you a story is just a conspiracy theory, do what I do: wait for the transcript.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.