Biden sues Justice Department to block release of audio recordings

Former president Joe Biden sued the Justice Department on Tuesday, seeking to block the Trump administration from releasing the recordings and transcripts of his private interviews with a ghostwriter who was helping to write his memoir.

The lawsuit argues that releasing the recordings would reflect an abandonment of the Justice Department’s “obligations to safeguard sensitive and highly personal law enforcement information.”

The Justice Department informed Biden that it plans on June 15 to provide the material to a congressional committee and a conservative think tank that had filed a public records request, according to the lawsuit.

The conversations Biden had with writer Mark Zwonitzer occurred in 2016 and 2017, in the years after Biden’s son Beau died of brain cancer and as he was contemplating a run for president.

The Justice Department obtained the recordings during a 2023 special counsel investigation in which then-Attorney General Merrick Garland directed a probe into whether Biden, who had served as vice president from 2009 to 2017, mishandled classified materials in the years before he became president. Special counsel Robert K. Hur determined after an extensive investigation that while Biden carelessly handled sensitive material, no chargeable crime was committed.

The current legal battle stems from a public records request lodged by the conservative Heritage Foundation in 2024 for those recorded conversations. They reportedly include Biden reading from notebooks chronicling his time in office that investigators determined contained classified information.

The Justice Department, under Garland, had declined to release the recordings. At the time, according to the lawsuit, a department official opined that such a disclosure would be akin to “releasing the pages of an unindicted suspect’s diary entries, or the private text messages exchanged on the suspect’s phone – despite no charges having ever been brought.”

The Heritage Foundation has continued to fight for the release of those recordings during the Trump administration, and in March, the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee also requested them.

The Justice Department has said it plans to hand over the material with “limited redactions,” according to Biden’s attorneys. They contend that the decision to release the material is “capricious and arbitrary.”

The lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court in D.C. accuses the Justice Department of suddenly reversing course from its Biden-era decision to block the release of the files.

“Joe Biden’s Justice Department tried to hide audio recordings that clearly demonstrate a significant decline in his cognitive abilities as far back as 2016,” a Justice Department spokesman said in a statement Wednesday. “This is the most transparent Department of Justice in history, and we will fight to ensure the American people can hear these recordings and draw their own conclusions about the former President’s mental acuity before he sought the presidency.”

The lawsuit alleges that the Justice Department is violating federal privacy laws and using what Biden’s lawyers described as a sham request from Congress as a way to circumvent federal laws around public records requests.

Biden’s attorneys claim that there is no legislative reason for Congress to want the materials. The House Judiciary Committee has said that it wants the tapes as part of its oversight into the “politicization of the Biden-Garland Department of Justice.”

“The Materials long predate the Special Counsel investigation over which the Committee purports to be conducting oversight and could not possibly shed light on the ‘politicization of the Biden-Garland Department of Justice’ – the Committee’s stated purpose,” the lawsuit states.

The audio recording of Biden’s five-hour-plus interview with Hur was leaked to the media last year. Those tapes appeared to back Hur’s assertion that Biden would probably come across as an “an elderly man with a poor memory” if a case against him were brought to trial.