President Trump responds to Biden lawsuit over Justice Department interview recording
Donald Trump answered a question about Joe Biden’s lawsuit against the Justice Department to block the release of a tape interview.
Former US President Joe Biden is suing the Justice Department over its decision to release recordings and transcripts of private conversations with a ghostwriter for his 2017 memoir, “Dad, Promise Me: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose.”
According to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, May 26, Mr. Biden is seeking to “stop the department’s plans” to release personal information that the department “has long advocated for disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in response to a purported request from the House Judiciary Committee.”
Biden’s attorney, Amy Jeffress, argued that her client’s request for personal information was “a pretext, lacks a legitimate legislative purpose, is outside the scope of the committee’s investigative authority, and is invalid and unenforceable.”
But because the department plans to release the information to the committee on June 15 without a court order, Biden is “now seeking judicial review to block the department’s final plans for the pending FOIA case and impose a duty on the department to protect sensitive law enforcement information,” the complaint states.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., filed a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act of 2024 after requesting access to what Biden’s lawsuit called “private and confidential conversations” between Biden and Mark Zwonitzer during the writing of his memoir.
The foundation’s request was in response to then-special counsel Robert Hur’s 2023 report on Biden’s handling of classified documents, which painted the former president as an elderly man with “declining faculties,” including memory loss, USA TODAY previously reported.
Materials will be released on June 15th
The complaint alleges that the Justice Department notified Biden in February of its “intent to release recordings and recordings to plaintiffs in the FOIA lawsuit” without any “formal explanation of the change in direction.”
Then, on May 5, “the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, through its attorneys, notified President Biden that it had made a final decision to release the materials, with limited redactions, to estate plaintiffs and Congress on June 15,” the complaint states.
The lawsuit alleges that the conversations with Zwonitzer, which took place at former President Biden’s home in 2016 and 2017, were understood to be private and “reflected in these audio recordings and transcripts were part of the writing process for President Biden’s 2017 memoir,” in which “President Biden recounts a politically momentous and personally painful year in his life, beginning with Thanksgiving in 2014.”
“That year, President Biden navigated foreign and domestic policy challenges as vice president and considered running for president in 2016,” while his eldest son, Beau, battled brain cancer. Beau Biden passed away in May 2015 at the age of 46.
“The public and private aspects of President Biden’s life have always been intertwined, but perhaps never more so than during those difficult years,” the complaint states.
Lawsuit claims Biden has right to privacy
The lawsuit claims that such personal information is exempt from disclosure under the FOIA law.
“All Americans, including current and former vice presidents, have the right to privacy in the private conversations of their homes,” the complaint says.
Justice Department says it will fight to release recordings
The Justice Department responded to the complaint in a May 27 email to USA TODAY: “Joe Biden’s Justice Department sought to suppress audio recordings dating back to 2016 that clearly showed his significant cognitive decline.”
“The Department of Justice, in its most transparent manner in history, will work hard to ensure that the American people hear these recordings and draw their own conclusions about the former president’s mental acuity before he seeks office,” the department said.
President Donald Trump also weighed in on the lawsuit, calling Biden a “crooked politician” in a May 26 post on Truth Social.
Saman Shafiq is a trending news reporter for USA TODAY. Contact her at sshafiq@usatodayco.com and follow X and Instagram @saman_shafiq7.
