Former President Joe Biden is suing the Department of Justice to keep interview recordings from becoming public.
The audio recordings and transcripts are private conversations Biden had with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer that were obtained during special counsel Robert Hur’s classified-documents investigation in 2023, per the lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court.
Hur ultimately determined that criminal charges were not warranted.
The conversations from 2016 and 2026 allegedly discuss private matters such as his son Beau Biden’s cancer and death, and Biden’s choice not to run in 2016.
The lawsuit argued that the family and personal challenges should be kept private.
“Every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home,” the lawsuit reads, arguing that Biden’s recordings should remain exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, which is the right of the American public to access records from any federal agency.
“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 lawsuit added.
Two parties are seeking the Biden-Zwonitzer conversations for different reasons. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, and one of its visiting fellows, Mike Howell, filed a FOIA request in 2024 for the recordings, but the DOJ initially fought it. Congress is separately seeking the same recordings for oversight and political investigation purposes.
Howell, who is also the president of the Oversight Project, shared their post on X:
“We sued for the tapes. The tapes belong to the American People and we will get them the tapes that Biden wants hidden.”
President Donald Trump also posted on Truth Social, calling Biden a “crooked politician” for suing the DOJ in an attempt to keep the recordings private.
Following Trump’s second term, the DOJ changed course and plans to release the recordings on June 15 of this year.
Chief Washington correspondent for MeidasTouch, Scott MacFarlane, posted on X that 2017 Trump appointee Judge Dabney Friedrich has been assigned to the case in Washington, D.C.