Former president Joe Biden appears to admit having classified material in his possession after his time serving as Barack Obama’s vice president had ended, in newly-released audio tapes.

The extensive recordings capture conversations between Biden, now 83, and his ghostwriter Mark Lewis Zwonitzer between October 2016 and April 2017.

Obtained by the Oversight Project, an offshoot of right-wing think-tank the Heritage Foundation, the clips have been made public following a prolonged freedom of information battle.

The group sued the Department of Justice to secure their release, a step Biden had fought before finally giving up his legal challenges Monday, allowing for their publication.

In a clip from October 2016, the man who went on to be the 46th president can be heard telling Zwonitzer “They didn’t even know I had this,” referring to a file of old notes.

Then in a further exchange dated February 2017, a month after he left the VP office, Biden says: “I just found all of the classified stuff downstairs.

“I wrote the president a handwritten 40-page memorandum arguing against deploying additional troops to Iraq – I mean, to Afghanistan – on the grounds that it wouldn’t matter, that the day we left would be like the day before we arrived.”

In a third conversation dated April 2017, Biden said: “Some of this may be classified, so be careful. I’m not sure, it’s not marked classified but…”

Announcing the release of the tapes, the Oversight Project claimed the unearthed audio bore out former special counsel Robert Hur’s 2024 assessment of Biden that he was a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Hur made the comment in a report explaining his decision not to attempt to prosecute the Democrat for mishandling classified information. That investigation that came in the wake of the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida in August 2022 to retrieve official documents he had taken from the White House.

The group said the release of the Zwonitzer tapes “caps more than two years of litigation to bring transparency to the American People about the Autopen President” (echoing a favorite Trump slur against Biden), declaring that it had “fought tooth and nail” to bring the material to light.

“Together, we defeated both the Biden-led Justice Department and his high-price private attorneys,” it added. “These tapes we are releasing today should have come out a long time ago.”

Biden spokesperson TJ Ducklo responded: “President Biden’s conversations for a book a decade ago that discussed his late son are private, and were provided to the Department of Justice on the express condition they stay that way.

“Reversing course and making them public is just the latest example of this administration weaponizing the DOJ for political retribution.”

The Independent has reached out to Biden’s office for further comment.

Elsewhere in the recordings, which were made to help Zwonitzer co-write the memoir Promise Me, Dad (2017), Biden can be heard discussing Obama’s disagreement with him over the economy in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

“I was a really lonely voice on housing, I was a lonely voice on the middle class,” Biden said. “I mean, I thought we should be much more aggressive than putting these guys in jail and the bankers. I mean, he used to really get p***ed at me.

“I think the reason why we didn’t do more, by the way, is because I think that – this is a harsh thing to say – But I think subconsciously, at least, Barack and his guys were beholden to Silicon Valley. And the Valley guys didn’t want the s*** that I – you know, I wanted.”

Biden also addressed Obama’s reluctance to appoint Larry Summers to the Federal Reserve because he considered him a “liability,” a verdict borne out when Summers was caught up in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal earlier this year.

He also discussed Obama’s skepticism over whether Biden could beat Hillary Clinton if he ran against her for their party’s presidential nomination in 2016 and their differences of opinion on the evolution of the American workplace.

“I wasn’t focused on robots and artificial intelligence and, and digitalization,” Biden told Zwonitzer. “I really believed that, and I still believe it, that we could bring back the manufacturing in America.”