By Jarryd Jaeger – The Postmillennial
It has been revealed that Joe Biden‘s ghostwriter admitted to deleting audio recordings from interviews with the president at least in part because of special counsel Robert Hur‘s investigation into whether he mishandled classified documents after leaving the Obama administration.
During an interview with the Federal Bureau of Investigation last year, Mike Zwonitzer said he “wouldn’t say” how much of his decision to delete the recordings was motivated by the fact that an investigation had been launched, but noted that getting rid of audio files after using them was “something I do as a rule anyways.” The transcript was released on Thursday morning by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.
“The outside observer is going to look at this and say, Mark Zwonitzer, President Biden’s friend, ghostwriter, collaborator learned of the special counsel’s investigation, saw this was happening and then deleted all these audio recordings,” the agent said. “I just need the truth on this one … That was part of your motivation, at least something you were aware of when you did this?”
“I’m not going to say how much of the percentage it was of my motivation,” Zwonitzer replied, adding, “I was aware that there was an investigation.” He went on to note that he was “very concerned” about being hacked by those who would then spread the audio all over the internet, but said that was mainly because there was “a lot of personal stuff and emotional stuff about Beau,” Biden’s late son. He said out of an abundance of caution, he “took the audio files subfolder from both the G drive and [his] laptop, and slid them into the trash.”
Zwonitzer noted that deleting audio files was standard practice, and not just something he did in Biden’s case, saying, “I generally save transcripts but I haven’t over the years ever saved audios.” He went on to admit he deleted the files after becoming aware of the investigation, and that after doing so, he didn’t tell anyone, nor did nobody reach out to him asking about it.
It has been alleged that Biden shared the contents of some of the classified documents in question with Zwonitzer during the course of their interviews, which would be a breach of national security. Hur himself testified in March that Zwonitzer “tried to destroy the evidence.”