WASHINGTON — Joe Biden filed suit against the Justice Department on Tuesday, asking a federal court to stop the agency from releasing roughly 70 hours of audio recordings and transcripts of private conversations he held with his memoir’s ghostwriter — material that the former president says was handed over to prosecutors under a promise of confidentiality and now sits at the center of a fight that has as much to do with political score-settling as with the law.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, targets a plan by the Trump-era Justice Department to deliver the recordings to the House Judiciary Committee and the conservative Heritage Foundation on June 15, barring a court order blocking the release. The recordings were made in 2016 and 2017 at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, when he sat down repeatedly with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer for what would become his 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose” — a book about his decision to consider a White House run while his eldest son Beau was dying of brain cancer. The tapes later found their way into the hands of former special counsel Robert Hur during his 2023 investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents after his vice presidency.
Hur found that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed” classified materials but ultimately recommended no criminal charges, concluding that prosecutors would struggle to convince a jury to convict a former president well into his eighties of a felony requiring proof of willful intent. His 345-page report — which described Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” — became one of the most politically charged documents of the 2024 campaign cycle. The audio, which Biden’s legal team says contains deeply personal conversations about grief, family and his son’s illness, was never released. Until now, the department itself agreed that it should stay sealed.
That consensus fell apart the moment Donald Trump returned to the White House. Biden’s lawyers said in their complaint that in February 2026, the Justice Department notified the former president that it intended to turn over the recordings — “without any formal explanation for its about-face.” The shift, the lawsuit argues, was not driven by any change in the legal landscape but by a change in political management at the top of the department. Biden’s attorneys accused the Trump administration’s DOJ of using the House Judiciary Committee’s request as a pretext to route around the Freedom of Information Act’s privacy exemptions, which had shielded the materials from public disclosure under three prior FOIA lawsuits.
“The DOJ themselves have said these tapes serve no public interest,” TJ Ducklo, a spokesman for the former president, said in a statement. “What’s happening now isn’t about transparency. It’s about politics.”
The lawsuit lays out the competing legal arguments in deliberate detail. Biden’s team contends that recordings of private conversations made inside a citizen’s home — even if those conversations touched on sensitive national security matters — are protected by a well-established privacy interest, one that does not evaporate simply because the Justice Department later obtained them through a criminal investigation. The complaint quotes directly from the filing: “Every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home. And when the U.S. Department of Justice obtains that private information through a criminal investigation, the Department bears a particular responsibility to protect it from disclosure.”
The case slots into a larger pattern of legal combat between Biden and the current administration over how much institutional deference a former president is owed once he has left office and his party has lost power. Biden had separately moved to intervene in the Heritage Foundation’s standalone FOIA lawsuit against the Justice Department. A federal judge allowed him to join that case last week, though the order barred him from certain legal maneuvers he had sought. The Tuesday filing builds on that earlier legal intervention, escalating Biden’s efforts to prevent disclosure through a direct suit of his own.
The Heritage Foundation has been candid about its rationale. The conservative think tank has said it sought the recordings in part because of Hur’s description of Biden’s mental state — the suggestion that the tapes would document memory lapses and cognitive slippage even before Biden became president. House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, for his part, has argued that audio provides context that transcripts cannot, capturing what he called the “verbal and nonverbal” dimension of an interview that cannot be conveyed on a printed page. The House voted in 2024 to hold then-Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over a separate set of audio — recordings of Biden’s own interview with Hur — after the White House asserted executive privilege over them.
That earlier battle ended in a standoff. This one, unfolding under a department now helmed by Trump appointees, looks different. Biden’s complaint specifically challenges the department’s use of a congressional subcommittee request to sidestep FOIA restrictions, arguing that accepting such a procedural maneuver would effectively give Congress a backdoor to any investigative materials it wanted, stripping away privacy protections Congress itself had codified into law. The suit asks the court to declare the committee’s demand pretextual and to permanently bar the release of the recordings to both the Judiciary Committee and the Heritage Foundation.
The White House responded with characteristic bluntness. President Trump posted on his social media platform that Biden was a “crooked politician” for filing the suit, framing the legal action as an attempt to conceal evidence of incompetence rather than a legitimate assertion of privacy rights. The administration has not publicly explained why it reversed the prior DOJ position on disclosure, and the department did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The shift in posture echoes a pattern of the department’s changed orientation under current leadership, as seen in the Comey prosecution and other politically sensitive cases.
Legal scholars watching the case say the central question — whether a former president’s private conversations with a ghostwriter, even ones that touched on classified material, carry the same privacy protections as any other citizen’s home conversations — is genuinely unsettled. The investigation that produced the recordings is over. No charges were brought. Biden is now a private citizen. Whether that changes his relationship to the material the government holds about him is the question the court will now be asked to answer before June 15 arrives.
Biden’s legal team has been in near-constant contact with Justice Department lawyers in recent weeks, the complaint reveals, working through potential redactions and possible compromises that might allow some limited disclosure while protecting the most sensitive material. Those negotiations collapsed. The lawsuit that followed suggests there is no longer any middle ground that both sides find acceptable, and that the former president is prepared to let a court decide whether the audio survives or surfaces before summer.
The suit marks the latest chapter in a legal saga that has shadowed Biden since late 2022, when classified documents from his vice-presidential tenure were found at his former private office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington and at his Wilmington home. Biden’s attorneys notified federal authorities immediately. Garland appointed Hur in January 2023. The resulting report, released in February 2024, cleared Biden of criminal liability but planted a political landmine that continued detonating throughout that election year. The audio of Biden’s own interview with Hur — a separate set of recordings from the Zwonitzer tapes at issue in Tuesday’s lawsuit — remains sealed under executive privilege, still contested, still unheard.
What happens to the Zwonitzer recordings now depends on how quickly the court acts. The Justice Department has set June 15 as its disclosure date. Biden’s lawyers are pressing for a ruling before that deadline. Whether the material becomes public, and whether it reshapes any remaining public judgment of the 46th president, will hinge on a federal judge’s calendar and a legal question about privacy in the age of special counsels — a question no one thought to settle until it arrived, tape by tape, in the inbox of a changed administration.
Additional reporting as reported by ABC News and per NPR.
