Biden sues to stop U.S. Justice Department from releasing interview recordings

Former U.S. President Joe Biden speaks at a Department of Defense Commander in Chief farewell ceremony, at Joint Base Myers-Henderson Hall in Fort Myer, Virginia, on January 16, 2025. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters via CNN Newsource)

Former U.S. President Joe Biden is suing to block the House Judiciary Committee from obtaining, and potentially releasing, audio recordings and transcripts of conversations in 2016 and 2017 with the ghostwriter of his memoir.

The court case is part of a simmering debate between the Trump administration and Biden regarding how much privacy the former president is due.

The U.S. Justice Department has said it plans to release the tapes regarding Biden’s book, “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose,” to Congress on June 15.

But Biden argues that during his presidential administration, the Justice Department argued extensively for privacy around the recordings with Mark Zwonitzer, because they were personal and often touched upon the death of Biden’s son, Beau, and its impact on him deciding not to run for president in 2016.

Heavily redacted transcripts of the conversations have already been made public.

“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 lawyers wrote in a federal court filing in Washington on Tuesday night. “And when the U.S. Department of Justice obtains that private information through a criminal investigation, the Department bears a particular responsibility to protect it from disclosure.”

The tapes are in the Justice Department’s possession because they were part of the criminal investigation in 2023 and 2024 into whether Biden mishandled classified documents after his terms as vice president, and discussed sensitive national security details with Zwonitzer. Special counsel Robert Hur did not bring any charges against Biden.

In a separate lawsuit, Biden is also opposing in court the Justice Department’s plan to release the same taped conversations with Zwonitzer to the conservative Heritage Foundation. A judge last week said Biden should be allowed to argue against Heritage getting the tapes, which the Justice Department has also agreed to in recent weeks.

The Heritage Foundation said it wants the tapes partly because they reportedly show how Biden was aging, having memory lapses, even before he became president.

GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, recently gave his own reasoning on wanting the tapes.

“I think it’s just important for the American people to know exactly where the President of the United States was… . (W)e’d like to see all that information, I think, to underscore what the Democrats were trying to hide just a few years ago,” Jordan said in May, Biden’s team pointed out in its court filing.