Newly released audio from then-President Joe Biden’s lengthy interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur captures Biden’s diminished mental acuity in his failure to recall the year his son Beau passed away, the year his vice presidency ended, the year President Donald Trump was first elected, and why he possessed certain classified documents.

Biden’s long pauses and incoherent ramblings in response to light questioning from Hur are apparent in over four minutes of audio first reported by Axios on Friday night. The release fulfills expectations that the Trump administration would finally disclose the long-anticipated interview tape after Biden’s administration obstructed its disclosure at every turn.

Mistakenly, Biden said his son Beau died in 2017 and had to be reminded that he passed away in 2015. Biden also said Trump was first elected in 2017 and had to be corrected that Trump won the presidency in 2016.

“OK, yeah. In 2017, Beau had passed and — this is personal — the genesis of the book and the title Promise Me, Dad, was a — I know you’re all close with your sons and daughters, but Beau was like my right arm and Hunt was my left,” Biden said at one point in the interview audio, with lengthy pauses peppered throughout.

He also can be heard stumbling over his words and whispering throughout the audio, two aspects of the interview the transcripts fail to fully capture. Biden struggled to explain why he possessed classified documents and veered into rambling, storytelling territory about his decision not to run for president in 2016.

Hur investigated Biden for potentially mishandling classified documents from his Senate and vice presidential tenures. His February 2024 report labeled Biden “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and argued he would present as such in front of a jury. Although Hur found evidence Biden “willfully” retained and disclosed classified materials, he declined to pursue criminal charges against the sitting president.

The audio disclosure comes amid a fresh reckoning about Biden’s mental decline during his presidency spurred by Axios reporter Alex Thompson and CNN host Jake Tapper’s book, Original Sin, detailing the lengths of Biden’s decline and the cover-up surrounding it. Thompson, a journalist with a lengthy track record of hard-hitting reporting on Biden’s faculties, was one of the Axios reporters who obtained the Biden-Hur audio snippet.

At the time of Hur’s report, Biden’s allies in the Democratic Party and news media rushed to defend his mental capabilities. They questioned Hur’s credibility and partisan allegiances, even when the transcripts from Hur’s interview clearly reflected stumbles on Biden’s part.

The audio release further vindicate’s Hur assertions about Biden’s mental lapses and memory struggles, which came months before Biden’s disastrous debate performance caused him to eventually drop out of the presidential race.