Former President Joe Biden and his team have filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice in a panicked bid to prevent the release of audio recordings from private sessions with his ghostwriter, material that later connected with questions about his mental acuity and his handling of classified information.
The suit was filed in a federal court and comes several weeks before the Justice Department is expected to pass the recordings and transcripts to GOP lawmakers and conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. The recordings come from 70 hours of conversations Biden recorded at his home in 2016 and 2017 while he was working on his memoir, Promise Me, Dad, which he wrote with biographer Mark Zwonitzer.
The book chronicled the former president’s life while he mulled over running for president while his son, Beau, was battling brain cancer. The tapes eventually made their way into the hands of Special Counsel Robert Hur while he was investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents. Hur concluded that Biden had read classified material out loud to Zwonitzer.
According to a report from Trending Politics News, Hur opted not to file charges against the former president because it would be difficult to prove Biden willfully divulged the information due to his memory issues and other cognitive problems. The recordings also led to Hur stating in a February 2024 assessment that Biden, 81-years-old at the time, would appear to jurors as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
The description was like a political atom bomb going off smack in the middle of Biden’s re-election campaign, fueling speculation about whether he was fit to discharge the duties of the president should he be elected to serve a second term. According to information contained in Hur’s report, the recordings feature Biden telling his ghostwriter, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”
They show him reading whole journal entries containing classified intelligence “nearly verbatim” on at least three separate occasions. Several court filings also indicate that Zwonitzer deleted some of the audio after finding out Hur had been appointed special counsel in 2023. However, investigators were able to recover the material.
President Trump had strong words for Biden and his team’s attempt to keep the recordings private, referring to the former commander-in-chief as a “crooked politician” on Truth Social. In a new court filing, Biden’s legal representatives say that releasing the recordings would be “an unwarranted invasion of President Biden’s privacy.”
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“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 went on to write. The legal team then tried to argue that when the DOJ gathers private information during a criminal investigation, it must protect that material from being released to the public. They also pointed out the ghostwriter recordings were separate from Hur’s own interview with the former president, which Biden has also been trying to keep from being released to the public.