Trump calls Biden 'grossly incompetent' after DOJ lawsuit

President Donald Trump is in favor of the Department of Justice's decision to release audio recordings and transcripts of Joe Biden's private conversations with the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose” after the former president recently sued the department in an attempt to block the materials' release.

"I'd like to see it," Trump said while speaking to a reporter during a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, May 27. "I would like to see what he has to say because we can never allow what happened to this country to happen. The man was grossly incompetent."

Trump added Democrats came "very close to destroying our country" due to their "bad" policy.

Earlier, in a May 26 post on Truth Social, Trump had weighed in on the lawsuit by calling Biden “a Crooked Politician."

Why is Joe Biden suing the DOJ?

Biden, in a lawsuit filed Tuesday, May 26, in the U.S. District Court for Washington, DC, is seeking to "halt the Department’s plan" to release his private information, which "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, in the lawsuit, 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."

However, 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.

DOJ says it will 'fight' to release recordings

DOJ, in an email to USA TODAY on May 27, responded to Biden's lawsuit, 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.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, DC, filed a request, and later a lawsuit in 2024 under the 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 the 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 states.

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