President Joe Biden’s ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer may not be used to being center stage, but that’s exactly where the unassuming writer has found himself.
Zwontizer has kept his head down and his mouth shut since it emerged last Thursday that the Justice Department considered charging the 61-year-old author with obstruction of justice after learning that he had destroyed recordings and notes of interviews during which the president Joe Biden shared classified information.
Seen in these exclusive images obtained by DailyMail.com, Zwonitzer came to light on Friday afternoon.
He cut a slim, casual figure, dressed in a navy blue jacket and pants, as he left his New York apartment to run an errand.
Joe Biden’s unassuming ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer was seen breaking cover in New York City on Friday in the wake of special counsel Robert Hur’s report.
Zwonitzer, an unlikely figure to be embroiled in the president’s classified documents scandal, cut a slim, casual figure, dressed in a navy blue jacket and pants.
The special counsel’s report last Thursday revealed that Biden had shared classified information contained in some of the files with Zwonitzer while the two were working on their second book.
When contacted by DailyMail.com, Zwontizer was polite but resolute, saying only that he “couldn’t” speak when asked about the Justice Department investigation in which he had been involved.
With glasses, a light beard, gray hair and a professorial demeanor, Zwonitzer is an unlikely figure to be embroiled in a classified documents scandal.
However, he is so close to the 81-year-old president that Biden has said he would trust the writer with his life.
In a way, he has done just that, twice, by making Zwonitzer the ghostwriter of his memoirs, first in 2007 with ‘Promise to Keep’ and second, ten years later, with ‘Promises to Dad.’
It was during this second project that, according to a report by special counsel Robert Hur released Thursday, Biden was “careless in his handling of classified material.”
According to Hur, the president kept notebooks he had kept during his tenure as vice president and read them aloud to Zwonitzer sometimes for more than an hour at a time.
The notes contained classified material for which Zwonitzer did not have security clearance.
On one occasion, the report states, those memos cited details from a Situation Room meeting at the White House in 2015.
Zwontizer was polite but admitted he “couldn’t” talk about the Justice Department investigation when approached by DailyMail.com.
Zwonitzer worked with Biden on two of his memoirs, Promises to Keep, in 2007, and Promise Me, Dad, which was published 10 years later.
Zwontizer was polite but admitted he “couldn’t” talk about the Justice Department investigation when approached by DailyMail.com.
“On February 16, 2017, after he was no longer vice president, Mr. Biden read parts of the same notebook entry out loud and almost verbatim to Zwonitzer, including parts that contained information that remains classified up to the Secret level.” , adds the report.
More to the point, Biden was well aware of Zwonitzer’s security status, having been informed that the writer did not have clearance when he once suggested that Zwonitzer could be hired as a historian for the Office of the Vice President.
However, a recorded conversation between Biden and Zwonitzer in 2017, recovered by federal investigators, allegedly included Biden saying that he “just found all the stuff classified downstairs” at a house he was then renting in Virginia.
Similarly, investigators found a box of materials labeled ‘brand Z.’
The admission found a strange echo in the events of December 2022, when FBI agents discovered classified documents from Afghanistan in a cardboard box in the garage of Biden’s Delaware home.
Bafflingly, Zwonitzer deleted audio recordings from 2017 during which Biden shared classified information.
Biden flatly denied doing any such thing during a press conference on Thursday.
But the report released that same day revealed it was, and officials were able to recover most of Zwonitzer’s deleted recordings using forensic tools.
A report released last Thursday by special counsel Robert Hur said Biden was careless in his handling of classified material found in his home and former office, but concluded that no criminal charges against the president were warranted.
This image, contained in special counsel Robert Hur’s report, shows notebooks seized from a filing cabinet beneath printers in President Joe Biden’s first-floor office in Wilmington in January 2023.
According to the report, Zwonitzer deleted his recordings with the president after learning of the Justice Department’s investigation into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, but officials were able to recover most of them with forensic tools (pictured: evidence photographs).
However, investigators were ultimately satisfied with the writer’s explanations for why he had removed the material, describing them as “plausible and innocent reasons.”
Zwonitzer is a respected, if not prolific, author and documentarian, with a handful of titles to his name and two Emmy nominations (Outstanding Achievement in Nonfiction and Outstanding Achievement in Writing) for his work for PBS.
He has written two nonfiction biographies, “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?”, written with Charles Hirshberg.
The biography of the traditional American folk music group, the Carter Family, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2002.
His book ‘The Statesman and the Storyteller: John Hay, Mark Twain, and the Rise of American Imperialism’ was published in April 2016.
Zwonitzer began his career with a brief stint as a fact-checker for Esquire magazine. But it was his work as a researcher for journalist Richard Ben Cramer’s book, ‘What it Takes: The Way to the White House,’ that ironically put Zwontizer into his category. walking distance from the Oval Office.
FBI agents discovered the classified documents from Afghanistan in a cardboard box in the garage of his Delaware home in December 2022.
The report is filled with photographs of documents recovered from Biden’s home or an office he used when he was vice president.
Interviewed for Nieman News about the experience of working with Cramer, Zwonitzer recalled that he was a ’23-year-old research kid’ who didn’t know anything, when Cramer ‘ripped’ him out of his life and moved him. to Washington to work for him.
It was the fall of 1986, and Zwonitzer got a house with a friend of hers who had just gotten a job at the Washington Post, Geraldine Hirshey.
Working there turned out to be life-changing for Zwonitzer. He would personally marry Hirshey, with whom he has a son and daughter.
Professionally, he would become a key player in the exhaustive account of the 1988 Republican and Democratic presidential primaries, of which Biden became a well-known supporter.
Biden reportedly contacted Zwontizer in 2006 when he was first thinking about working on his own memoir.
Interviewed about Zwonitzer, who was a registered Democrat until 2012 and now lists his party affiliation as “other,” Biden said the “great asset” of the man whom he described as a “great, great guy” was that he helped him organize.
Perhaps, in retrospect, both men wish the organization had included a clearer separation between classified and unclassified material.