The Justice Department informed a federal judge it had located a partial transcript of President Joe Biden's interviews with his ghostwriter. Classified secrets were in the transcripts.

     The DOJ previously denied it had the transcript, which played a role in special counsel Robert Hur's recently completed criminal investigation into Biden's handling of classified material.  In a court filing late Monday, DOJ attorneys told a federal judge that transcripts of Biden's interviews with Mark Zwonitzer had been located, Politico reported.  The filing came one day after Biden announced he was ending his reelection bid.  Last month, DOJ attorneys handling a Freedom of Information case told U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich that it would be very time-consuming to process other audio files containing Biden's interviews with Zwonitzer.

     "We don't have some transcript that's been created by the special counsel that we can attest to its accuracy," DOJ lawyer Cameron Silverberg said at the June 18 hearing on a suit brought by the Heritage Foundation, Politico reported.  However, Silverberg said in a court filing Monday night the department "in the past few days" confirmed that Hur's office had received transcripts made of a portion of Biden's 2007-2017 discussions with Zwonitzer. 

     "In the past few days … the Department located six electronic files, consisting of a total of 117 pages, that appeared to be verbatim transcripts of a small subset of the Biden-Zwonitzer audio recordings created for the SCO by a court-reporting service," Silverberg wrote in the new filing.  The filing also revealed DOJ reached out to Hur to find out what materials the special counsel relied upon for key portions of his report.  Hur acknowledged relying on the Biden-Zwonitzer audio and Biden's handwritten notes pertaining to a memo about Afghanistan to compile his report.