Biden files lawsuit against DOJ to block release of biographer interview audio

Former President Joe Biden sued the Justice Department on Tuesday, asking a federal court to stop the release of roughly 70 hours of audio recordings and transcripts from interviews he gave a ghostwriter for his 2017 memoir, recordings that became central evidence in the special counsel investigation into his mishandling of classified documents.

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, comes just weeks before the DOJ's planned June 15 release of the materials to the House Judiciary Committee and the Heritage Foundation, both of which sought the files under the Freedom of Information Act. Biden's legal team is asserting executive privilege, the same shield he invoked in 2024 when House Republicans first tried to access the recordings.

The core question is simple: Why is a former president fighting this hard to keep the public from hearing his own words?

What Biden wants buried

The recordings at issue capture interviews Biden conducted in 2016 and 2017 with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer while preparing his memoir, "Promise Me, Dad." Special Counsel Robert Hur's team obtained those files during a year-long investigation into whether Biden mishandled sensitive government documents found at his Wilmington, Delaware, home and his former private office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C.

Hur's 345-page report, released in February 2024, determined that Biden "willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen." But Hur concluded there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges. His team interviewed 147 people, including Biden himself.

That report drew national attention for its description of Biden's memory lapses, a finding that carried political weight during the 2024 campaign. Now the Trump administration's Justice Department wants to let the public hear the source material for itself.

A DOJ spokesperson laid out the administration's position bluntly, as CBS News reported:

"Joe Biden's Justice Department 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."

That statement frames the fight as a matter of public accountability, and raises a pointed question about what Biden's own DOJ worked to keep sealed.

The legal maneuvering

Biden's attorneys, in a motion filed Tuesday, argued that the DOJ reversed its prior position without explanation. Just The News reported that Biden filed the suit on May 26, 2026, specifically to head off the June 15 release date.

The motion stated:

"In February 2026, 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."

The "about-face" Biden's lawyers reference is the shift that occurred when the Trump administration took control of the Justice Department. Under Biden's own attorney general, Merrick Garland, the DOJ had resisted releasing the recordings. Now, under new leadership, the department has reversed course and told a federal judge it plans to hand over redacted versions of the files.

Three separate FOIA lawsuits had already been filed seeking to unseal the audio. The Heritage Foundation's case is the one that prompted DOJ attorneys to tell a federal judge earlier this month that they intended to release the files, with redactions, to both the Heritage Foundation and the House Judiciary Committee on June 15, absent a court ruling blocking the move.

The pattern of the Biden team's approach is worth noting. Fox News reported that the DOJ has accused Biden's lawyers of delay tactics. Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate stated: "The public deserves to hear the tapes and read the transcripts as redacted by President Donald J. Trump's Department of Justice."

Biden spokesperson TJ Ducklo offered a different framing, telling Fox News that Biden "cooperated fully with special counsel Hur, and agreed to provide audiotapes of conversations with his biographer for a book about his deceased son on the condition that they would not be made public."

Executive privilege, or personal convenience?

Biden first asserted executive privilege over the recordings in 2024, after House Republicans pushed to access them. That assertion came while Biden was still in office and still had a political interest in keeping the material sealed. The question now is whether that privilege survives a change in administration, particularly when the sitting president's own DOJ has decided the files should be released.

Executive privilege exists to protect the functioning of the presidency, not to shield a former officeholder from embarrassment. Biden's legal team will have to persuade a federal judge that recordings of a private citizen discussing his memoir with a ghostwriter qualify for that protection. It is a stretch, and the DOJ under the current administration clearly thinks so.

The broader context matters. The DOJ has faced scrutiny from multiple directions in recent years, with congressional committees and outside groups pressing for accountability across a range of cases. The ODNI's recent criminal referrals involving former officials tied to Democratic-era investigations reflect a growing push to examine whether institutions acted in good faith or served partisan ends.

In this case, the timeline speaks for itself. Biden's DOJ fought to keep the tapes sealed. Trump's DOJ moved to release them. Biden is now suing Trump's DOJ to reimpose the seal his own DOJ created. Whatever one thinks of the merits, the optics are those of a man who does not want the public to hear what is on those recordings.

Classified documents: the double standard that won't go away

The classified documents saga has always carried a whiff of unequal treatment. In August 2022, the Justice Department searched Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate and seized White House documents with classified markings. Trump was charged with several dozen counts related to mishandling classified materials. Those charges were dismissed in July 2024 when a judge determined that Special Counsel Jack Smith had been unlawfully appointed.

Biden, by contrast, was found by Hur to have willfully retained and disclosed classified materials, yet faced no charges. The special counsel's reasoning, as laid out in his report, centered partly on Biden's presentation as a sympathetic, elderly man with memory problems. That characterization became its own political controversy.

Now Biden wants to prevent the public from hearing the very recordings that informed Hur's assessment. If the tapes vindicate Biden, releasing them would help him. If they don't, the public has a right to know what its government knew and when.

The DOJ's handling of politically sensitive investigations continues to generate friction. Concerns about institutional impartiality have surfaced in cases ranging from prominent Democratic attorneys' anxieties about the current DOJ leadership to ongoing congressional oversight battles, including House Oversight subpoenas directed at Attorney General Bondi.

Meanwhile, snippets of Biden's interview with Hur were obtained and published by Axios in May 2025, offering a partial preview. But partial previews are not the same as 70 hours of unfiltered audio. The full recordings would let the public, and Congress, evaluate for themselves whether Hur's characterization of Biden's mental state was accurate, generous, or something else entirely.

What comes next

The case now sits with a federal judge in the District of Columbia. Biden needs a ruling before June 15 to block the release. The DOJ has signaled it will fight to proceed. The Heritage Foundation and House Judiciary Committee are waiting.

Late Tuesday night, President Trump weighed in on Truth Social, calling Biden a "Crooked Politician" in response to the lawsuit. The post reflected the political temperature around the case but added no new factual dimension.

The legal arguments will turn on the scope of executive privilege, the applicability of FOIA exemptions, and whether a former president can override the current administration's decision to release materials from a completed investigation. Those are legitimate legal questions. But they exist within a political reality that is hard to ignore.

Federal investigations have increasingly touched Democratic figures and institutions in ways that test whether the system applies its rules evenly. The FBI raid on a Virginia Democratic lawmaker who spent years taunting Trump over federal probes is one recent example of that dynamic playing out.

Biden cooperated with Hur's investigation. His team says he handed over the tapes on the condition they would stay private. But FOIA exists precisely to prevent the government from making those kinds of backroom deals with the public's information. The recordings were gathered as part of a federal investigation into a former vice president's handling of classified material. They belong to the public record, not to Joe Biden's personal archive.

A man who spent years telling Americans he had nothing to hide is now in federal court trying to make sure they never hear the proof.