Joe Biden, the former president, has filed a lawsuit to try to prevent the justice department (DoJ) from releasing transcripts and audio of interviews that exposed his frequent memory lapses and helped derail his 2024 re-election campaign.
The decade-old conversations with the author of his biography ended up in the hands of Robert Hur, the special counsel who was appointed to look into allegations Biden improperly handled classified documents.
Hur evaluated the files, and also spent five hours interviewing Biden himself, concluding in a 2024 report to Congress that there was no criminal wrongdoing, but portraying the then 81-year-old president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”.
Biden withdrew from the 2024 election following repeated questioning of his age and mental competence, and endorsed Kamala Harris as the ultimately unsuccessful Democratic nominee.
His lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Washington DC, accuses the DoJ of an “unwarranted invasion of President Biden’s privacy”.
It seeks to halt the department, which once fought to keep the transcripts and recordings secret, from handing them over to the Republican-controlled House judiciary committee and conservative Heritage Foundation.
“Every American, including a sitting or former vice-president, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home,” his attorneys wrote of the conversations from 2016 and 2017 with Mark Zwonitzer, the author who worked with Biden on two memoirs .
“And when the US Department of Justice obtains that private information through a criminal investigation, the Department bears a particular responsibility to protect it from disclosure.”
The recordings, made during and immediately after Biden served as Barack Obama’s vice-president, were scrutinized by Hur, a Republican, as part of his investigation.
In his report, Hur found Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen”, including “classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan”, but said it did not warrant criminal charges.
Biden welcomed the 345-page report, but pushed back on Hur’s assertion he had a “significantly limited” memory because he struggled to recall key events and facts.
“My memory is fine,” he told a reporter in February 2024, noting that his interview with Hur was immediately following the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack on Israel. “I was in the middle of handling an international crisis.”
Biden has separately fought the release of the audio of his interview with Hur, a portion of which was leaked last year. The Republican-controlled House in 2024 voted to hold Merrick Garland, Biden’s attorney general, in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over that audio after the White House exerted executive privilege, shielding it from Congress.
While Biden was adamant that he treated classified information seriously, the transcript shows that he was at times fuzzy about dates and details and he said he was unfamiliar with the paper trail for some of the sensitive documents he handled.
Republicans have argued Biden was being given a pass by his own justice department and that Donald Trump, who was also under investigation for improperly taking classified documents and storing them at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort home, had been unfairly victimized by prosecutors.
Trump was investigated by another special counsel, Jack Smith, and charged in a case that was ultimately dismissed by Aileen Cannon, a Florida judge he appointed. In February, Cannon blocked the justice department from ever publishing Smith’s report into the investigation.
Democrats stressed Biden’s cooperation in the investigation against him, and contrasted that with Smith’s case against Trump, who was accused of refusing to return classified documents requested by the National Archives.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
