(DCNF)—The Department of Justice (DOJ) has less than two weeks to decide whether to release audio from an interview widely credited with driving former President Joe Biden’s decision to exit the 2024 presidential race.
A Washington, D.C. court gave the Trump administration until May 20 to state how it will respond to a lawsuit seeking to uncover an October 2023 recording from the DOJ’s investigation of Biden’s handling of classified documents. The tape featured a talk between the former president and former Special Counsel Robert Hur, who decided not to prosecute Biden because he was “an elderly man with a poor memory,” and several organizations have been pressing the DOJ for its release.
“The audio recording will lend additional answers to a fundamental question that the country has been grappling with, [which] is: Who was running the country for the last few years?” Kyle Brosnan, vice president of legal at the Oversight Project, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Oversight Project, then the Heritage Foundation’s investigative arm, first sued in March 2024 for the tape’s release under the Freedom of Information Act, followed by Judicial Watch days later. CNN filed its own lawsuit for the recording in April 2024 and was later joined by twelve other news organizations before they and the conservative plaintiffs were consolidated into one case. CNN did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Judicial Watch Senior Attorney Michael Bekesha told the DCNF that “the American public as a whole is interested in” the audio because it would determine “how the president sounded” and “how he answered questions.”
The White House is now “considering” letting the public hear the tape, a source familiar told the DCNF. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt previously told Daily Caller White House Correspondent Reagan Reese that “the American people would be quite interested to hear that tape” when asked for an update on its possible release.
Daily Caller White House Correspondent @reaganreese_: “Is the White House considering releasing the audio of Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur to the public, which [Biden] had previously blocked?”
LEAVITT: “I think the American people would be quite interested to… pic.twitter.com/JnBgtIKHry
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) April 8, 2025
The Oversight Project is still litigating the case despite transitioning to become a separate entity from the Heritage Foundation, Brosnan told the DCNF.
“This isn’t a partisan dispute,” Brosnan told the DCNF. “Regardless of who you voted for in the last election or what your political leanings are, it is vitally important to understand and trust and believe that the president is mentally capable of doing the job,” he added.
The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.
The agency released a written transcript of Hur’s interview at Congress’ request in March 2024, revealing the then-80-year-old Biden’s gaffes, such as forgetting what year his son died and when President Donald Trump was first elected, as well as occasional stuttering.
The Biden administration appointed Hur as special counsel in January 2023 to investigate his handling of classified documents after batches of them were found at his private residence. Hur determined at the end of the probe that “Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency” in violation of federal law.
The former special counsel’s interview — and his conclusion that Biden’s “poor memory” would make him “sympathetic” to a jury — added to public concern about Biden’s mental fitness before he dropped out of the 2024 presidential race in July.
The two conservative groups suing, however, maintain that the transcript may not tell the whole story. Brosnan and Bekesha noted that some of Biden’s “repeated words or the use of filler words such as ‘um’” were omitted, as Biden’s DOJ stated in a court filing.
Bekesha also pointed to emails Judicial Watch obtained showing that the White House asked a court reporter to edit out instances in which attorneys appeared to answer questions for Biden before he did. The former president also “might have been confused about the name of the Secretary of Defense,” Judicial Watch said at the time, citing the emails.
“The court reporter seemed to think that there were instances where Biden’s attorneys were the one to answer the question and then the president repeated the answer, and the Biden attorneys were saying, ‘That’s not what happened. He just [said] his answer twice,’” Bekesha told the DCNF.
The Biden administration fought to suppress the audio for months, claiming in court that it had “executive privilege” to keep it from the public. Another argument the DOJ made against the tape’s audio release was that the recording “could be improperly altered” by people using “artificial intelligence” and “‘deep fake’ technologies.”
At the Trump DOJ’s request, a judge in February granted an extended deadline of May 20 for the DOJ to decide whether it will continue the fight to prevent the tape’s release.
The House Judiciary Committee also sued for the Hur recording in July 2024, and that case is still pending. A communications official for the committee did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
Brosnan said it’s “a good thing” that media companies “perceived to be left-leaning” jumped into the legal fight.
“It’s important to get this to the American public, and the more allies we have in the fight, the better,” he said.
While staying out of politics publicly since exiting the 2024 race, Biden has made some effort to defend his reputation post-presidency. The former president claimed in a Wednesday interview that it was “hard” to end his bid for reelection because his term was “so successful.”
In a brief statement, a close associate of Biden dismissed any effect the Hur tape could have on how Americans remember him.
“The transcript has been out for more than a year so I’m not sure there’s much new there,” the associate told the DCNF.
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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.
