Joe Biden’s 2017 remark about finding classified stuff downstairs resurfaces in newly released recordings In February 2017, roughly a month after leaving the vice presidency, Joe Biden told his ghostwriter that he had just found all of the classified stuff downstairs.
The comment, captured in audio recordings of conversations with Mark Zwonitzer while working on the memoir Promise Me, Dad, has drawn renewed attention following the public release of the tapes in late July 2026 by the Oversight Project after a prolonged freedom of information effort. The recordings span conversations from October 2016 through April 2017. In one October 2016 exchange, while still vice president, Biden referred to material and said they did not even know he had this.
In the February 2017 discussion at his then Virginia residence, he linked the downstairs discovery to a handwritten 40 page memorandum he had written to President Barack Obama in 2009 arguing against a troop surge in Afghanistan. He later cautioned in an April 2017 conversation that some of this may be classified so be careful, while noting uncertainty about markings. These statements gained significance years later.
In November 2022, Biden’s personal lawyers discovered a small number of documents bearing classified markings in a locked closet at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., an office he used after leaving the vice presidency. They notified the National Archives, which retrieved the materials. Further searches uncovered additional classified records in a garage and adjacent storage area at Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home in December 2022 and January 2023.
Some of those materials related to Afghanistan policy from 2009, matching the subject Biden discussed with Zwonitzer. Special Counsel Robert K. Hur, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, investigated the matter. Hur’s February 2024 report noted the 2017 recording in which Biden said he had just found all the classified stuff downstairs while referring to the Afghanistan memo.
Investigators recovered marked classified documents on that topic from a damaged box in the Delaware garage amid household items. The report also documented notebooks containing classified information found in unlocked drawers. Hur concluded that evidence showed Biden willfully retained some classified materials after leaving office but declined to recommend criminal charges, citing among other factors Biden’s age and memory issues at the time of interview. Biden has maintained that he took classified information seriously and cooperated fully.
When the initial discoveries became public in January 2023, he said he was surprised to learn of government records at the Penn Biden Center and did not know their contents. He later emphasized that materials at his home were in locked or lockable cabinets and noted his Corvette was in a locked garage.
In response to aspects of the Hur report, he disputed characterizations of willful retention of certain documents and said references to classified material in the recordings should have been framed as sensitive or private. The newly released audio provides primary source context for a statement that featured in the special counsel’s analysis. It illustrates how materials from Biden’s vice presidential years remained accessible in private residences years after he left office, contributing to the broader examination of how classified records are handled by former officials.
The tapes do not alter the legal outcome of the investigation, which produced no charges, but they offer a contemporaneous window into Biden’s own description of finding and referencing such materials in 2017.
