Former President Joe Biden sued the Justice Department on Tuesday to stop the release of audio recordings and transcripts of private conversations he had with the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir, asking a federal judge in Washington to block disclosure planned for June 15.
The dispute centers on material from Biden’s talks with Mark Zwonitzer while they were writing Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose. Biden’s lawsuit says the conversations covered a year of his life that began during the Thanksgiving holiday in 2014. Without court intervention, the department has said the records will be released with limited redactions to the Heritage Foundation, which first sought them in a 2024 Freedom of Information Act request, and to Congress.
The filing lands after months of shifting positions inside the Justice Department. Biden’s attorney, Amy Jeffress, said that during President Donald Trump’s second term the department reversed course. In February, it notified Biden that it intended to release the recordings and transcripts to the plaintiffs in the FOIA case. Then on May 5, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General told Biden, through counsel, that the department had made a final decision to release the materials on June 15, again with limited redactions.
The Heritage Foundation later filed its own lawsuit to obtain Biden’s remarks to Zwonitzer, and it also pursued records that then-special counsel Robert Hur relied on for parts of his 2023 report on Biden’s handling of classified documents. Hur’s report described Biden as painfully slow and said he struggled to remember events and to read and relay his own notebook entries. The audio of Hur interviewing Biden about classified documents remained in his possession after he was vice president and confirmed memory lapses that White House officials denied at the time. Hur declined to criminally charge Biden.
The fight is now over whether the memoir-related recordings and transcripts are exempt from disclosure under FOIA. The Justice Department had previously withheld the materials and argued they should stay sealed, but it later reversed that position under Trump. On social media, Trump called Biden a Crooked Politician, adding another layer of political strain to a case that is already about what the government can force into the open. Biden’s lawsuit is meant to stop the release before it happens; if the judge does not intervene, the records will become public on June 15.
