Former President Joe Biden has filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department to stop the release of audio recordings and transcripts from his interview with a ghostwriter. These files were obtained by the special counsel who investigated how Biden handled classified documents. The Justice Department had previously argued that these files were exempt from disclosure under public records law.
According to Associated Press, the Justice Department plans to release the files to Congress and a conservative group, the Heritage Foundation. Biden’s lawyers argue that doing so would violate his right to privacy. “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.
“And when the U.S. Department of Justice obtains that private information through a criminal investigation, the Department bears a particular responsibility to protect it from disclosure.” The lawsuit claims that releasing these audio recordings and transcripts would “constitute an unwarranted invasion of President Biden’s privacy.”
Biden has been fighting to keep his private conversations out of public reach for some time now
The recordings in question are from Biden’s interviews with Mark Zwonitzer, a ghostwriter who worked with him on his two memoirs. Special counsel Robert Hur obtained these files as part of his investigation into Biden’s improper retention of classified documents.
Hur’s year-long investigation led to a 345-page report that questioned Biden’s age and mental competence but recommended no criminal charges against the then-81-year-old. This is not the first time Biden has tried to keep his conversations private, as he has also separately sought to block the release of audio from his interview with Hur himself.
The House voted to hold Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over that audio, after the White House used executive privilege to shield it from Congress. The transcripts of five hours of Biden’s interviews with federal prosecutors were released in 2024, showing that Biden was at times unclear about dates and details, and unfamiliar with the paper trail for some of the sensitive documents he had handled.
It is worth noting that Biden had also broken his silence on election integrity issues in the past, showing a pattern of speaking out on politically charged matters. Republicans argued that Biden was being let off easy by his own Justice Department and that Trump had been treated unfairly by prosecutors.
Democrats, on the other hand, pointed to Biden’s cooperation in the investigation and contrasted it strongly with the separate criminal case against Trump, who was accused of refusing to return classified documents requested by the National Archives that he had kept at his Florida estate.
The two cases became a major political flashpoint, with each party using them to push their own narratives about how the justice system treated the two presidents differently. Trump has previously pointed to China’s criticism of Biden’s leadership as further evidence that the former president had weakened America’s standing on the world stage.
Biden’s legal team continues to insist that the release of these recordings serves no legitimate public interest and would only harm his personal privacy. As the legal battle between Biden and the Justice Department continues, the outcome will likely set an important precedent for how much privacy protection former presidents and senior officials can expect when they are investigated by federal authorities.
Published: May 27, 2026 12:15 pm