Former President Joe Biden sued the Justice Department on Tuesday, urging a federal judge to block the release of audio recordings and transcripts of his private conversations with the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir.
The suit stems from a 2024 Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which later filed its own lawsuit to obtain Biden’s remarks to Mark Zwonitzer when they were writing “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose.”
The Justice Department had withheld the sought-after materials, arguing they were exempt from disclosure. But during President Donald Trump’s second term, Biden’s attorney Amy Jeffress writes in Tuesday’s lawsuit in U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., “the Department has reversed that position.”
In February, Jeffress writes, “without any formal explanation for its about-face, the Department notified President Biden of its intention to release the audio recordings and transcripts to the plaintiffs in the FOIA Action.”
Months later, on May 5, “the Office of the Deputy Attorney General informed President Biden, through counsel, that the Department had made a final decision to release the materials, with limited redactions, to the Heritage Plaintiffs and to Congress on June 15,” Biden’s lawsuit says.
In “President Biden’s conversations with Zwonitzer and, ultimately, in his memoir, he recounted the year of his life that began during the Thanksgiving holiday in 2014,” Jeffress writes. “That year was among the most consequential of President Biden’s political life and the most painful of his personal life.”
Biden argues that such personal information is exempt from disclosure under 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,” Jeffress wrote in the lawsuit.
The Heritage Foundation sought all records that then-special counsel Robert Hur relied on to write particular passages of a 2023 report on Biden’s handling of classified documents that described him as “painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.”
The audio of Hur interviewing Biden about the classified documents that remained in his possession after he was vice president confirmed memory lapses that White House officials denied at the time. Hur declined to criminally charge Biden.
A Justice Department spokesperson claimed in response to Biden’s lawsuit that the Justice Department during the previous administration had “tried to hide audio recordings that clearly demonstrate a significant decline in his cognitive abilities as far back as 2016.”
“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 spokesperson said.
Zwonitzer did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Trump weighed in on the lawsuit on Truth Social, calling Biden “a Crooked Politician.”
Without court intervention, the materials will be released June 15.
