(The Daily Signal)—Special counsel Robert Hur released a report last month recommending against charging President Joe Biden for the mishandling of classified documents from his years as vice president and senator, in part because a jury would find Biden sympathetic as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and because his “diminished faculties” make it less likely he intentionally violated the law.
The Daily Signal has obtained the transcript from Biden’s interviews with special counsel Hur on Oct. 8 and 9, the interviews on which Hur based his report. The transcripts reveal that Biden forgot when he was vice president, when his son Beau died, and even details from an interview a few hours after they happened.
Here are six key take-aways from the transcript.
1. Biden Appears Not to Understand Document Classification
Throughout the Oct. 8 interview, Biden seemed to misunderstand different types of classified information. In fact, one of his attorneys, Bob Bauer, explicitly stated that Biden relied on staff to handle classified information.
“I would like to avoid having the president address the legal requirements for classification,” Bauer said. “I think it’s clear he’s relied on staff for that.”
Biden appeared not to know that materials marked “Eyes Only” are classified.
“In your understanding, if something is marked ‘Eyes Only,’ does that mean that it’s being treated as classified, or does it not mean that?” Marc Krickbaum, Hur’s deputy special counsel, asked Biden.
“The answer is, I’m not sure,” the president responded.
“I had real strong disagreements on a couple of policy matters that were consequential relating to the allocation of forces” in Afghanistan, Biden explained. “So, there were some really bright guys in the administration who I strongly disagreed with on something. So, it might say, ‘Eyes Only,’ like, ‘Joe, this is what you asked for.’”
Biden drew a distinction between documents marked “Eyes Only” and “Secret,” and documents he considered classified.
“If they’re marked ‘Classified,’ one of those things with circles around it and clearly it’s a classified document, not something that’s ‘Eyes Only’ or ‘Secret’ or ‘Selective’ or whatever the hell it is, other than saying, ‘Top Secret,’ it would not be in here,” the president said.
In the Oct. 9 deposition, Krickbaum asked Biden about a document marked “Confidential.”
“Do you recognize that to be a classification marking?” he asked.
“No,” Biden said. “I mean, confidential, doesn’t want to get around. It’ s not in a category, I don’t think, of code word, ‘Top Secret,’ that kind of thing.”
Hur and Krickbaum brought up many classified documents, most notably a memo Biden wrote to then-President Barack Obama in 2009 about Afghanistan, and Biden seemed either not to know that the documents had been in his possession or that they were classified.
2. Forgetting Key Details
Hur asked Biden about his move from the Naval Observatory, the home of the vice president, to an address on Chain Bridge Road in McLean, Virginia. Biden recalled the correct year—asking, “This is, what, 2017, 2018, that area?”—but he associated the year with different events from two years prior.
“Remember, in this timeframe, my son is—either been deployed or is dying, and so it was—and by the way, there were still a lot of people at the time when I got out of the Senate that were encouraging me to run in this period, except the president,” Biden said. He continued until asking, “What month did [Biden’s son] Beau die? Oh, God, May 30th …”
Rachel Cotton, from the White House Counsel’s Office, reminded the president that his son died in 2015.
“Was it 2015 he had died?” Biden asked. An unidentified speaker confirmed it had been May 2015.
“Trump gets elected in November of 2017?” Biden continued. Someone corrected him, saying “2016.”
“2016, all right,” Biden said. “So—why do I have 2017 here?”
During another round of questioning, Biden asked, “Well, if it was 2013—when did I stop being vice president?” Cotton reminded him, “2017.”
Biden also appeared to forget details from his conversation with Hur mere hours after they had happened.
About an hour into his Oct. 8 interview, Biden mentioned “two file cabinets that were attractive that I had when I was in either the home—I bought furniture for the home on Chain Bridge Road.”
Yet, after Biden took a break, Hur returned to the topic, and the president seemed not to recall ever mentioning the filing cabinets.
“I think before we took the break, if I remember correctly, you had mentioned some specific pieces of furniture,” Hur noted. “I think you mentioned a couple of file cabinets that I think you said you purchased in order to place them into the Chain Bridge Road residence.”
“Purchased—that I purchased—I don’t remember having any—brought any—I may have,” Biden responded. “Actually, I’m not sure.” He then asked for a photo to jog his memory about which house they had been discussing.
3. ‘Stuff on the Garage Floor’
Biden’s testimony about the classified documents in the garage of his private home in Wilmington, Delaware, appears to conflict with his lawyers’ official narrative that his lawyers, rather than Biden himself, first discovered the classified materials in his garage. Biden’s lawyers reported discovering classified documents there in November 2022, and returning them to the National Archives and Records Administration.
When Hur asked Biden about moving out of the Naval Observatory, Biden suddenly brought up the garage, and described what sounded like a personal recollection of discovering documents in the garage.
“Is that how the stuff got in my—didn’t get in my garage until much later,” he said, unprompted. “There was stuff one day. I came home, and all of it was on the garage floor. This was later though. It must have been after—anyway.”
Later on, Biden described “a lot of stuff they gathered up, and they just took up and dropped in my driveway like this, and some of them little skinny boxes, some open boxes, some but just everything piled up. I remember walking in one day.”
Hur presented photographs of classified materials that had been discovered in the garage.
“I don’t remember how a beat-up box got in the garage,” Biden said.
4. Long-Winded Yarns as Stall Tactic
Biden repeatedly launched into long discussions about Beau and his younger son, Hunter; his views about foreign policy and his general approach to politics; his history as a young lawyer; and other topics in an apparent attempt to avoid answering questions that might get him into legal trouble.
He described his reasons for keeping files related to an old Corvette, and mentioned his disagreements with others in the Obama administration about Afghanistan.
At one point, Hur interrupted the president in order to move on to a topic pertinent to the investigation.
“Mr. President, I am so sorry to interrupt you,” Hur said. “I just want to make sure—I have a fair amount of material … .”
“Yeah, I’m going to stop,” Biden replied.
In another instance, Biden apologized, saying, “Sorry for the detail.”
5. Did Not Know Location of Classified Documents
Biden admitted that he would put classified documents into his notebooks after briefings, and that his staff would compile his notebooks without knowing where the classified documents were.
“Staff doesn’t know I put anything in the book when coming in,” he said. “But if they did anything at the time, they took that whole book, put it in a drawer in my desk to get it out of the way, and never went into the book to see what was in there.”
Krickbaum, Hur’s deputy, asked Biden directly, “If there were marked classified documents stuffed in those notebooks, you were not aware of it?”
“Correct,” Biden said.
“Do you know where your notebooks were in the time period immediately after your term as vice president?” Krickbaum asked on Oct. 9.
“No, but I think that what they did, they gathered up my notebooks, and I think they were in drawers in this room,” the president said, referring to a room in the Chain Bridge Road residence.
6. Claiming He Didn’t Remember
Biden repeatedly claimed that he didn’t remember certain details about his past and his retention of classified documents. He may have adopted this strategy in order to avoid perjuring himself, but it also gave him the appearance of not intending any ill will in keeping classified documents from the National Archives.
On Oct. 9, Krickbaum, Hur’s deputy, pressed Biden on a February 2017 meeting with a ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer.
“In the course of explaining that memo about Afghanistan, you said to Mark, ‘I just found all the classified stuff downstairs,’” Krickbaum said, referring to Zwonitzer. “And so, you can imagine, we are curious what you meant when you said, ‘I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.’”
“I don’t remember, and I’m not supposed to speculate, right?” Biden replied.
Bauer, the president’s lawyer, replied, “Correct.”
Krickbaum pressed Biden on why he told Zwonitzer this, and the president repeatedly stated that he did not remember: He didn’t remember saying that, and he did not remember finding classified materials.
Biden also admitted that he found a paper with a red classified marking on it after his vice presidency, and he gave it to a staffer, telling the staffer to return it to the National Archives. Yet, even for this incident, Biden admitted, “I just remember being told that.”
In July, a jury in Miami, Florida, indicted former President Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents and obstructing justice in the investigation regarding those documents.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.