A federal lawsuit filed Tuesday puts former President Joe Biden on a collision course with the Trump Justice Department — and at the center of it all are roughly 70 hours of audio recordings that once nearly derailed his presidency before it ended on its own.
Biden filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., targeting a planned government handover of recordings and transcripts to Republican lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee and the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The Justice Department has told a federal judge it intends to release the files, with redactions, by June 15.
The tapes were never meant for government hands.
Biden recorded them at his home in 2016 and 2017 while collaborating with biographer Mark Zwonitzer on his memoir, Promise Me, Dad — a book that traced his personal and political life while his son Beau was dying of brain cancer.
Those private sessions took a sharp turn when Special Counsel Robert Hur subpoenaed them as part of his investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents.
What the tapes captured proved significant. According to Hur’s findings, Biden told Zwonitzer during one session, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”
On at least three separate occasions, he read classified intelligence from his journals nearly word for word.
Hur’s February 2024 report found that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed” classified materials — yet he recommended against prosecution.
His reasoning: jurors would likely view Biden as a sympathetic, elderly man whose memory had deteriorated to a degree that made proving criminal intent nearly impossible.
Hur wrote that it would be difficult to persuade a jury to convict Biden — “by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
The report’s bluntest line — describing Biden as “an elderly man with a poor memory” — hit the political world like a grenade.
It landed squarely in the middle of his re-election campaign and accelerated a national conversation about whether the then-81-year-old was capable of serving another four years in office.
Now, with Biden out of office and Trump back in, the legal landscape has shifted dramatically.
The Justice Department blocked the Heritage Foundation’s original request for the files in 2024, when Biden was still president, citing exemptions under public records law. Trump reversed that position after returning to office in 2025.
Biden’s attorneys noted that in February 2026, with no formal explanation provided, the Department informed Biden it intended to release the recordings and transcripts to the parties seeking them through the FOIA action.
Biden’s legal team frames the release as a constitutional overstep.
“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 lawsuit states. “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.”
His attorneys also draw a distinction between these recordings and Hur’s direct interview with Biden — a separate set of tapes Biden is fighting to suppress through parallel legal action.
The Heritage Foundation has been explicit about its interest in the material, stating it wants the tapes partly because they reportedly document Biden experiencing memory lapses well before he became president.
Court records also show Zwonitzer deleted portions of the audio after learning in 2023 that Hur had been appointed special counsel. Investigators later recovered the deleted files.
The DOJ responded defiantly Tuesday, with a spokesperson stating: “This is the most transparent Department of Justice in history, and 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.”
President Trump weighed in on Truth Social shortly after the lawsuit became public, labeling Biden “A Crooked Politician!!!”
Hur’s classified documents probe originated in January 2023, after materials from Biden’s vice-presidential tenure surfaced at a former Washington office and at his Wilmington, Delaware, residence.
Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland named Hur special counsel. Recovered materials included classified documents related to U.S. military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, along with handwritten notebooks containing Biden’s notes on national security matters.
Whether a federal judge will grant an injunction halting the June 15 release remains an open question.
