Joe Biden sues Justice Department to block release of personal recordings

Former U.S. President Joe Biden sued the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) on Tuesday, hoping to block the release of audio recordings and transcripts of private conversations with his 2017 memoir ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer. According to a report by NBC News, the situation arose after a 2024 Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which had filed its own lawsuit to obtain the transcripts. Earlier, the DOJ had said that such materials were exempt from disclosure.

However, under Donald Trump's second term as President, the Justice Department informed Biden of its intention to release the transcripts with minimal redactions to the Heritage Plaintiffs and to Congress on June 15. The former President has argued that such information was personal in nature and was protected under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws. "Every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home," Biden's attorney Amy Jeffress wrote in the lawsuit.

As far as the Heritage Foundation is concerned, it sought to obtain records used by then-special counsel Robert Hur to write certain passages of a 2023 report, in which he referred to the former President as "painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries." The DOJ, on the other hand, believes that such information should reach the public.

"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," a spokesperson said. President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to call his predecessor a "crooked politician" for filing the lawsuit.

Democrats have raised several questions about the cognitive abilities of President Trump, mirroring what Republicans did with Joe Biden during the previous term. The former President had to drop out of a re-election bid due to his inability to carry on. Biden is facing pressure from the administration about the audio transcripts as well. According to a Washington Post report, the House Judiciary Committee has asked for the tapes to investigate the possible politicization of the DOJ during his term.

"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," Biden's lawsuit stated. The audio of the former President's interview with Hur was leaked to the media last year, and the report states that it confirmed his memory issues and cognitive shortcomings.

The lawsuit was filed on Tuesday by Biden's legal team in federal court in D.C., accusing the DOJ of reversing its earlier stance of not making the records public. That stance was taken when Biden himself was the President. Now, his lawyers argue that it would be a violation of federal privacy laws.