Former President Joe Biden sued the US Department of Justice on Tuesday, May 26, seeking to prevent the release of audio recordings and transcripts of private conversations with his biographer in 2016 and 2017, Reuters reported. The lawsuit was filed in federal court in Washington D.C.
The suit was filed days before the department’s planned June 15 release of the materials to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee and the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Biden’s attorneys noted in the filing that the recordings and transcripts contain Biden’s “private, sensitive conversations with his writing partner, Mark Zwonitzer, which took place at the former president’s home in 2016 and 2017.” In 2023, the DOJ obtained these materials after the special counsel probe was opened.
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The filing added that Biden “cooperated fully in that investigation, and the Special Counsel ultimately concluded that criminal charges were not warranted.” The attorneys also said that when the DOJ gets hold of private information for a criminal investigation, “the Department bears a particular responsibility to protect it from disclosure.”
Five things to know
Here are five things to know after Joe Biden sued the DOJ:
- Special Counsel Robert Hur had obtained the recordings in question as part of his probe into Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents from his time as vice president and senator, per Forbes.
- The recordings, made in Biden’s home, were part of the writing process for his 2017 memoir, ‘Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose’. It detailed Biden’s decision to pursue the presidency while his son Beau was suffering from brain cancer.
- The lawsuit demands that the DOJ not disclose “President Biden’s private information” to the House Judiciary Committee and the conservative Heritage Foundation, which had filed a FOIA request for that same information.
- According to the filing, every American, a former Vice President, has a right to privacy “in the personal conversations he has within his own home.”
- In the past, the Justice Department withheld the release of these clips and transcripts. They argued that these were exempt from disclosure. However, the Trump DOJ now plans to release them on June 15.
