Former President Joe Biden is suing the Trump Justice Department to stop the release of audio recordings from private sessions with his ghostwriter, material that later figured into questions about his mental sharpness and his handling of classified information.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court, comes weeks before the DOJ is expected to hand over the recordings and transcripts to Republican lawmakers and the conservative Heritage Foundation, according to reports.
The audio comes from roughly 70 hours of conversations Biden recorded at home in 2016 and 2017 while working on his memoir, Promise Me, Dad, with biographer Mark Zwonitzer. The book chronicled Biden’s life as he weighed a presidential run while his son Beau battled brain cancer.
Those tapes later landed in the hands of Special Counsel Robert Hur during his probe into Biden’s handling of classified documents. Hur’s investigation concluded Biden had read classified material aloud to Zwonitzer, but he recommended against prosecution, saying it would be hard to prove Biden acted willfully because of his failing memory.
The recordings became central to Hur’s politically explosive February 2024 assessment that the then-81-year-old would likely appear to jurors as an “an elderly man with a poor memory.” The description detonated in the middle of Biden’s re-election campaign and fueled fresh doubts about whether he was fit to serve another term.
According to Hur’s report, the recordings capture Biden telling Zwonitzer, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs,” and show him reading journal entries that contained classified intelligence “nearly verbatim” on at least three occasions.
Court filings also indicate Zwonitzer deleted some audio after learning Hur had been appointed special counsel in 2023, though investigators later recovered the material.
Donald Trump reacted on Truth Social to Biden’s attempt to keep the recordings private, calling his predecessor “A Crooked Politician!!!”
In the new court filing, Biden’s attorneys argue releasing the tapes would amount to “an unwarranted invasion of President Biden’s privacy.”
“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.
The legal team argues that when the Justice Department gathers private information during a criminal investigation, it must shield that material from public release. They also note the ghostwriter recordings are separate from Hur’s own interview with Biden, which the former president has also tried to keep from becoming public.
Hur’s probe began in January 2023 after classified documents from Biden’s vice presidency were found at a former Washington office and at his Wilmington, Delaware, home. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Hur as special counsel. Investigators recovered classified documents tied to U.S. military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, along with notebooks containing Joe Biden’s handwritten notes on national security and foreign policy.
Even with that material, Hur ultimately declined to recommend charges. He wrote that Biden would “present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Hur also said “it would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
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