Joe Biden Sues To Block Release of His Interviews With a Ghostwriter

President Biden is suing the Department of Justice to block the release of his audio recordings and transcripts of his conversations with the ghostwriter he used for his memoir, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose.The lawsuit, filed Tuesday at the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, claims the Justice Department “bears a particular responsibility to protect” Mr. Biden’s personal conversations because they derive from a now-closed criminal investigation. The recordings were obtained in 2023 by Robert Hur, the special counsel who investigated his handling of classified documents as a senator and vice president.The 70 hours of audio recordings and transcripts are from interviews with Mark Zwonitzer, who worked with Mr. Biden on his memoirs. Mr. Hur reviewed them as part of his investigation that ended with him declining to recommend criminal charges. His 345-page report to the attorney general questioned Mr. Biden’s mental competence, calling him “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”The Heritage Foundation in 2024 sued the Justice Department seeking the recordings and transcripts. The foundation said it wants the tapes partly because they reportedly show how Mr. Biden was aging — having memory lapses — even before he became president.“President Biden revealed classified information and was not prosecuted because of his cognitive issues,” the foundation’s Oversight Project president, Mike Howell, said in a statement. “These tapes will further prove the massive lie regarding Biden’s fitness for office and the fact Biden revealed classified information.”The agency withheld the materials, arguing that they were exempt from disclosure. In court filings, Justice cited “privacy interests” and claimed releasing them would be the equivalent of “releasing the pages of an unindicted suspect’s diary entries or the private text messages exchanged on the suspect’s phone.”Congressional Republicans argued the Justice Department was simply trying to protect the president. The department has reversed policy under the Trump administration, and in February notified Mr. Biden that it planned to release the information to the Heritage Foundation and to the House Judiciary Committee.The committee chairman, Jim Jordan, said Republicans want the tapes to help show Democrats were trying to hide Mr. Biden’s mental frailty.“I think it’s just important for the American people to know exactly where the President of the United States was,” Mr. Jordan said in a May 12 Fox News interview. “We’d like to see all that information, I think, to underscore what the Democrats were trying to hide just a few years ago.” Mr. Jordan added.In a court filing, Mr. Biden’s lawyers said the conversations involved sensitive topics from one of the most painful periods of his personal life, including the period when his eldest son, Beau, fought brain cancer and ultimately passed away.President Trump shared a news report on Mr. Biden’s lawsuit on his Truth Social account late Tuesday and wrote “A Crooked Politician!!!” Mr. Trump was later asked about the suit during a cabinet meeting at the White House. “Maybe there’s some constitutional reason. I don’t know. I’d like to, I would like to see what he has to say because we can never allow what happened to this country to happen,” Mr. Trump said. “The man was grossly incompetent.”The Biden audio and transcripts are set to be released on June 15 if the courts do not intervene.

Joe Biden Sues To Block Release of His Interviews With a Ghostwriter

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