Last weekend, when audio of Joe Biden’s 2023 interviews with former special counsel Robert Hur became public, the former president tried to deflate its significance, insisting, through a spokesperson, that “the audio does nothing but confirm what is already public.” Indeed, transcripts from the two days of interviews have been publicly available for over a year.
But, as we’ve all experienced, hearing a conversation and reading those same words are often wholly different experiences. As a former litigator who’s sat through innumerable depositions and multiple trials, I know the power of live, human voices — and how impossible it is to capture on paper the nuances of tone, pitch, speed and emphasis — firsthand. And those nuances are precisely why a friend privately predicted to me months ago that the audio, once released, would be devastating to Biden.
My friend wasn’t wrong. The political potency of Biden’s age, digressions and memory lapses is magnified on the audio, through which we hear his halting, slow speech, the way his voice trails off to a murmur mid-thought, and even his confusion when asked about his handling of classified documents as vice president.
Of course, the headlines about the audio have waned since its release Friday, muted by the Sunday evening disclosure that Biden has advanced-stage prostate cancer.
But the Biden audio remains significant, nonetheless, albeit for a different purpose. It’s a stark reminder that voices carry, that one’s conversational style and delivery have their own role in shaping public opinion — and decisions.
And given the capacity of an audio recording, or even a livestream, to convey what a transcript cannot, it made me wonder anew why, as an institution, the federal judiciary is so resistant to transmitting even audio from trials of significant public interest.
Consider the ongoing trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs, at which his former girlfriend Casandra “Cassie” Ventura testified for the better part of four days last week, often about Combs’ alleged sexual and physical abuse of her over roughly a decade. (Combs’ lawyers have acknowledged he was violent toward Ventura at times. He was indicted last year on multiple charges, including sex trafficking and racketeering. He has pleaded not guilty.)
On more than one occasion, Ventura testified about the March 2016 incident in which Combs allegedly hit her in the eye during a “freak off” at a hotel in Los Angeles, after which he attempted to drag her down a hotel hallway, as shown on now-public security video.
After that incident, Ventura testified, she left the hotel, and she and Combs then had a text exchange, in which she wrote, “When you get f----- up the wrong way, you always want to show me that you have the power and you knock me around. I’m not a rag doll, I’m someone’s child.”
Prosecutors have referred to that text before, including at a bail hearing in Combs’ case last September. But last Friday, Ventura read her own text aloud in court; she also testified that when Combs beat her during the “freak offs,” she felt “worthless, just like dirt, like I didn’t matter to him, but that I was nothing, like absolutely nothing.”
Each of us can read that testimony in a transcript or a newspaper and come to our own conclusion. But without her voice or any witness’s voice, is the picture complete? Nope — and the Biden audio sadly underscores how much we, the public, miss when the written word is all we have to go by.