Former President Joe Biden sued the Justice Department on Tuesday, seeking to block the release of audio recordings and transcripts from interviews he gave for his memoir. The materials were gathered by prosecutors during the special counsel investigation into how he handled classified materials after leaving the vice presidency.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., and says the department has told Biden it intends to release the recordings and transcripts to the Heritage Foundation and the House Judiciary Committee on June 15 unless a court order stops it. Biden’s lawyers said the current Justice Department reversed course beginning in February without any formal explanation.
The fight centers on interview material Biden gave to ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer for his 2017 memoir, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose. Those recordings and transcripts later became part of the Justice Department’s special counsel probe, which ended in February 2024 when former special counsel Robert Hur concluded that Biden had willfully retained and disclosed classified materials but recommended no criminal charges.
That finding made the interview material more than a literary archive. It became evidence in one of the most scrutinized federal investigations into a former president in recent years, and the Biden camp is now trying to keep it from becoming public record.
Biden’s filing argues that the recordings were personal conversations made in his own home and should not be turned over to outside groups. In the suit, his attorneys wrote that “President Biden—like every American—has a right to privacy in personal conversations he had within his own home,” adding that “that is particularly true here, where the Department obtained this information through a criminal investigation.”
The case also lands against the backdrop of a separate public-records battle. The Heritage Foundation had already filed its own lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act seeking documents from the investigation, and Biden intervened in that case before bringing his own challenge.
The immediate question is whether a federal judge will stop the release before June 15. If the court does not act, the recordings and transcripts could soon leave the confines of a criminal inquiry and enter the hands of a political organization and a congressional committee, sharpening an argument that has already followed Biden from the end of his vice presidency into his postpresidential years.
