Joe Biden has filed suit against the Justice Department to prevent the release of audio recordings and transcripts from his private sessions with the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir, a dramatic reversal that underscores the political stakes surrounding sensitive recordings from his final years in office.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for Washington D.C., targets materials that the conservative Heritage Foundation has been seeking through a Freedom of Information Act request since 2024. Biden's attorney Amy Jeffress argues that conversations between the former president and Mark Zwonitzer, who co-wrote "Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose," are exempt from disclosure under privacy protections embedded in FOIA law.
The timing is crucial. The Justice Department previously withheld the materials, but under President Donald Trump's administration, that position shifted. In February, the department notified Biden it intended to release the audio and transcripts without explanation, Jeffress states in court filings. On May 5, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General informed Biden's legal team of a final decision to release the materials with limited redactions to the Heritage plaintiffs and Congress on June 15.
"Every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home," Jeffress wrote, arguing that the recordings capture intimate details from one of the most difficult periods of Biden's life. The memoir centers on a consequential year beginning in late 2014 that Biden's legal team describes as both pivotal to his political career and devastating on a personal level.
The Heritage Foundation's interest in the materials traces back to special counsel Robert Hur's 2023 report on Biden's handling of classified documents. That report contained passages describing Biden as "painfully slow" and noting instances where he struggled to remember events and had difficulty reading his own notes. The lawsuit seeks to obtain the audio recordings that Hur relied upon for those characterizations.
The classified documents investigation, which examined materials found in Biden's possession after his vice presidency, ultimately resulted in no criminal charges. But the audio from Hur's interviews with Biden confirmed memory lapses that White House officials had previously disputed.
Trump responded to the legal filing on Truth Social, characterizing Biden as "a Crooked Politician." Neither the Justice Department nor Zwonitzer has publicly commented on the lawsuit.
Unless a federal judge intervenes before the scheduled release date, the audio and transcripts will become available to the Heritage Foundation and Congress in less than three weeks, handing Trump's team and congressional allies access to recordings that Biden's legal strategy now aims to keep sealed.
Author Sarah Mitchell: "The shift in the Justice Department's position under Trump exposes how aggressively his administration is moving to weaponize legal mechanisms against Biden, even on matters that could be framed as personal privacy concerns."
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