No wonder they fought tooth and nail to keep them buried.

Yesterday, despite the best efforts of Joe Biden’s legal team, his 2017 recordings with memoirist and ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer were released to the public — all 70 hours of them. And they’re doubly damning. Not only do they paint an indelible portrait — roughly four years before he took office — of a man in clear cognitive decline and utterly unfit for the presidency, but they also reveal that, during his fleeting moments of normal human cognition, he absolutely knew he was sharing classified materials with a guy who had no business viewing them.

Even a brief snippet is downright chilling — especially when one considers that Biden occupied the Oval Office nearly eight years after these recordings were made.

“So this was, I early on, um, in ‘09 I just found all the classified stuff downstairs,” he tells Zwonitzer in one clip.

“Some of this may be classified,” Biden says at another point, “so be careful.”

Elsewhere in the recordings, he makes it unequivocal: “The next thing I have here is, um, this is classified.”

Remember: Even though special prosecutor Robert Hur ultimately determined that Biden had “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” after leaving office as Barack Obama’s vice president, he refused to charge the then-sitting president because he would “likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Talk about a low bar. The emperor has no memory, so we can’t hold him accountable.

But one wonders: Can we keelhaul a White House physician for continually lying to the American people about their president? For continually telling us that Biden was “a healthy, vigorous, 80-year-old male” rather than a punch-drunk Autopen President?

And can we refrain from mentioning Lady MacBiden’s name in polite company ever again? After all, she could’ve prevented all this. She could’ve protected her incapacitated husband from the presidency, and, more important, she could’ve protected the presidency from her incapacitated husband.

These tapes, though, make clear that Biden was indeed an elderly man with a poor memory — to put it kindly — but he was neither “sympathetic” nor “well-meaning.”

For the release of these tapes, we have a conservative watchdog group, The Oversight Project, to thank. The organization never took no for an answer and finally got what it had been after for years.

As the New York Post reports:

The Oversight Project argued that the extent of Biden’s disclosure of classified information is “much more egregious than previously disclosed” by Hur.

“At several points in the tapes, Biden references the information he is reviewing is likely classified, which is followed by significant audio redactions for classified information,” the group said in a statement. “This was not just once or twice, these classified redactions cover significant portions of the audio files released.

"The listener shouldn’t overlook the audio redactions because those redactions are intended to cover the disclosure of classified information.”

The deception was so widespread and so knee-jerk as to be obvious, and yet the mainstream media wouldn’t even broach the subject of Biden’s steep and obvious cognitive decline. Only when he was safely out of office did we “learn” how shocked — SHOCKED — Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson and the rest of them were that Biden had been propped up all along.

Folks, you don’t hate the Democrat-Media Complex nearly enough.

Remember when Biden took to “60 Minutes” in the wake of his “Justice” Department’s raid of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate to decry Trump’s retention of classified documents as “totally irresponsible”?

This guy. Of course, the difference is that Trump, as president, had the singular ability to declassify documents, whereas Biden, who’d been squirreling away sensitive materials since even before his days as Obama’s vice president, never enjoyed any such executive privilege.

Yet despite how cognitively addled Biden was long before he became president, we know that during his last decrepit hours in office, this Autopen Guy was able to issue blanket pardons for the likes of his son and Anthony Fauci. How can we let these pardons stand?

Yeah, yeah, I know we have more pressing matters to worry about than dirtbags like Hunter Biden and liars like Dr. Fauci, but without some serious accountability, what’s to keep the next lawless Democrat administration from farting in the general direction of Rule of Law?

We finally have the whole truth about Joe Biden’s docudrama, and about his pre-presidential cognitive decline. The question is simple: Will the American people hold the Democrats accountable for their Great Deception, for their calamitous lie?