Former US president Joe Biden sued the United States Department of Justice on Tuesday, seeking to bar the release of audio recordings and transcripts of private conversations with his biographer in 2016 and 2017.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, DC, comes ahead of the department’s planned June 15 release of the materials to the US House Judiciary Committee and the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The foundation sought them after they were used in then-Special Counsel Robert Hur’s 2023 investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents. Hur declined to bring criminal charges.
The department fought the Heritage Foundation’s 2024 request for the records as exempt from the Freedom of Information Act until US President Donald Trump took office, the lawsuit claims. It announced it would release the records in response to the committee’s request, which the lawsuit claims is intended only to skirt federal law barring their release.
The lawsuit asks the court to declare the committee’s request pretextual and invalid, and permanently bar the release of the records to the committee.
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said the department, during the Biden administration, sought to hide recordings that demonstrated a decline in Biden’s cognitive abilities as far back as 2016.
“We will fight to ensure the American people can hear these recordings and draw their own conclusions about the former President’s mental acuity before he sought the presidency,” the spokesperson said.
TJ Ducklo, a spokesperson for Biden, said in a statement that the former president cooperated with Hur’s investigation and provided the tapes on the condition that they wouldn’t be made public.
“The DOJ themselves have said these tapes serve no public interest,” Ducklo said. “What’s happening now isn’t about transparency. It’s about politics.”
The recordings, made in Biden’s home, were part of the writing process for his 2017 memoir, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose, which detailed Biden’s decision to pursue the presidency while his eldest son Beau fought brain cancer.
Earlier this month, Biden sought to intervene in the Heritage Foundation’s lawsuit against the Justice Department over the materials. Last week, a judge allowed Biden to join the case but barred him from pursuing claims about the committee’s request for the materials, according to court records.
