(Washington D.C.) — Former President Joe Biden sued the Justice Department on Tuesday, urging a federal judge to block the release of audio recordings and transcripts of his private conversations with the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir.
The suit stems from a 2024 Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which later filed its own lawsuit to obtain Biden’s remarks to Mark Zwonitzer when they were writing “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose.”
The Justice Department had withheld the sought-after materials, arguing they were exempt from disclosure. But during President Donald Trump’s second term, Biden’s attorney Amy Jeffress writes in Tuesday’s lawsuit in U.S. District Court for Washington D.C., “the Department has reversed that position.” In February, Jeffress writes, “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.” Months 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,” Biden’s lawsuit says.
In “President Biden’s conversations with Zwonitzer and, ultimately, in his memoir, he recounted the year of his life that began during the Thanksgiving holiday in 2014,” Jeffress writes. “That year was among the most consequential of President Biden’s political life and the most painful of his personal life.”
Biden argues that such personal information is exempt from a disclosure under FOIA laws. Without court intervention, the materials will be released June 1.
