Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. sued the Justice Department late Tuesday in an attempt to block the release of recorded interviews he had with his ghostwriter while drafting his 2017 memoir.
The recordings came into the Justice Department’s possession in 2023, under Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, when a special counsel investigated Mr. Biden over whether he had improperly stored classified materials from his term as vice president. Though the department at the time resisted efforts to publicly disclose those tapes, it has shifted course under Mr. Trump and is expected to turn them over to the House Judiciary Committee on June 15, absent a judge’s intervention.
The inquiry, which concluded in 2024, found that some evidence suggested Mr. Biden had “willfully” retained classified materials, but stated that the facts fell short of proving that he had done so. Still, the report released by the special counsel, Robert K. Hur, portrayed Mr. Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
In the lawsuit, Mr. Biden’s lawyers argued that the request from the Republican-led committee, which has long been investigating the Biden family, “is pretextual, lacks a legitimate legislative purpose, is outside the scope of the committee’s investigative powers, and is invalid and unenforceable.”
“Every American, including a sitting or former vice president, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home,” the complaint states, adding that when materials are collected during a criminal investigation, “the department bears a particular responsibility to protect it from disclosure.”
In the final years of his vice presidency, Mr. Biden had several conversations with Mark Zwonitzer, his ghostwriter for his book “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose,” which chronicles his professional and personal struggles after the death of his eldest son, Beau, to brain cancer.
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