Biden sues Justice Department to block release of audio files from biographer interviews

Former President Joe Biden has filed a lawsuit against the Justice Department seeking to block the release of files related to interviews he conducted with a biographer that later became a central part of a special counsel investigation into his handling of classified documents.

Biden’s lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeks to block the Justice Department from releasing about 70 hours of audio files and transcripts to the House Judiciary Committee from interviews with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer that were used for his 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad.” The interviews were conducted in 2016 and 2017.

Biden and his attorneys have long maintained that the files are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

The suit comes after three separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits were previously filed attempting to unseal them.

In one suit involving the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, attorneys for the Justice Department told a federal judge earlier this month they planned to release the files, with redactions, to both the committee and the Heritage Foundation on June 15 barring a ruling on the issue.

Mr. Biden asserted executive privilege over the recordings in 2024 after House Republicans attempted to access them.

CBS News has reached out to the Justice Department for comment on the complaint.

In late 2022 and early 2023, classified documents were found at Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, as well as his former private office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C.

In January 2023, special counsel Robert Hur was selected by then Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate whether Biden had mishandled sensitive documents. 

In February 2024, following a year-long probe, Hur released a 345-page report in which he determined that although “Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” there was not enough evidence to bring criminal charges against him.

Hur’s team interviewed 147 people as part of the investigation, including Biden.

Following Hur’s ruling, and during Biden’s remaining tenure in the White House, the Justice Department refused requests from Republican lawmakers to release audio from Biden’s interview with Hur, although snippets of it were obtained and published by Axios in May 2025.

In its motion Tuesday, Biden’s attorneys argued that under the Trump administration, the Justice Department has “reversed” its position on releasing those files.

“In February 2026, without any formal explanation for its about-face, the Department notified President Biden of its intention to release the audio recordings and transcripts to the plaintiffs in the FOIA Action,” the motion reads.

The investigation into Mr. Biden overlapped with a separate classified documents investigation into President Trump that began when the Justice Department searched Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August 2022, seizing White House documents with classified markings.

Mr. Trump was subsequently federally charged with several dozen counts accusing him of mishandling classified documents, but those charges were dismissed in July 2024 when a judge determined that the special counsel in that case, Jack Smith, had been unlawfully appointed. In February, that same judge blocked the release of the portion of Smith’s report that addressed Trump’s alleged mishandling of sensitive government documents. 

Late Tuesday night, Mr. Trump called Biden a “Crooked Politician” in a Truth Social post in response to Biden’s lawsuit.