Biden sues DOJ over release of private conversations for 2017 memoir

Former U.S. President Joe Biden is suing the Department of Justice over its decision to release audio recordings and transcripts of his private conversations with the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose.”

According to the case filed Tuesday, May 26, in the U.S. District Court for Washington, DC, Biden is seeking to "halt the Department’s plan" to release his private information that "the Department has long maintained is exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in response to a purported request from the House Judiciary Committee."

Biden’s attorney Amy Jeffress argues the request to release her client's private information is "pretextual, lacks a legitimate legislative purpose, is outside the scope of the Committee’s investigative powers, and is invalid and unenforceable."

But since the department intends to release the information to the Committee on June 15 without a court order, Biden "now seeks judicial review to stop the Department’s proposed end-run around pending FOIA litigation and to hold the Department to its obligations to safeguard sensitive and highly personal law enforcement information," the lawsuit states.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, DC, filed a request, and later a lawsuit under the 2024 Freedom of Information Act, to obtain Biden’s conversation with Mark Zwonitzer from when they were writing the memoir, described as "private, sensitive conversations" in Biden's lawsuit.

The foundation's request was in response to then-special counsel Robert Hur's 2023 report on Biden’s handling of classified documents that portrayed the former president as an elderly man with "diminished capacities," including memory loss, USA TODAY previously reported.

Materials to be released June 15

The lawsuit alleges Justice Department notified Biden "of its intention to release the audio recordings and transcripts to the plaintiffs in the FOIA Action" without "any formal explanation for its about-face" in February.

Later, on May 5, “the Office of the Deputy Attorney General informed President Biden, through counsel, that the Department had made a final decision to release the materials, with limited redactions, to the Heritage Plaintiffs and to Congress on June 15,” the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit argues Biden's conversations with Zwonitzer, which took place at the former president's home in 2016 and 2017, were understood to be private, "reflected in these audio recordings and transcripts were part of the writing process for President Biden’s 2017 memoir," in which "he recounted the politically consequential and personally painful year of his life that began on Thanksgiving in 2014."

"That year, President Biden navigated a range of foreign and domestic policy challenges as Vice President and weighed a run for the Presidency in 2016," while his eldest son, Beau, fought brain cancer. Beau Biden died in May 2015 at 46.

"The public and private dimensions of President Biden’s life have always been intertwined, but perhaps never more so than during that difficult year," the lawsuit states.

Biden has right to privacy, lawsuit argues

The lawsuit argues that such personal information is exempt from disclosure under FOIA laws.

“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 says.

DOJ says it will fight to release recordings

DOJ, in an email to USA TODAY on May 27, responded to the filing saying that “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," it said.

President Donald Trump also weighed in on the lawsuit by calling Biden “a Crooked Politician” in a May 26 post on Truth Social.

Saman Shafiq is a trending news reporter for USA TODAY. Reach her at [email protected] and follow her on X and Instagram @saman_shafiq7.