Rare Legal Step.. Biden Sues Trump Administration

Former US President Joe Biden filed a lawsuit against the Department of Justice in President Donald Trump's administration on Tuesday, in a rare legal step aimed at preventing the new administration from releasing recordings and transcripts of his private interviews with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer, who helped him write his memoirs.

The Washington Post reported that this action is a direct escalation of tensions between the former president and his successor, as Biden accuses the Trump administration of arbitrarily reversing a previous decision made by the department during his tenure.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., claims that publishing these materials reflects the Department of Justice abandoning its commitments to protecting highly sensitive and personal law enforcement-related information.

The department informed Biden, according to the lawsuit, of its intention to submit the recordings on June 15 next to a congressional committee and the conservative Heritage Foundation, which had filed a public records request.

The department also announced it would hand over the materials with limited redactions, which Biden's lawyers described as a capricious and arbitrary decision.

The recordings date back to 2016 and 2017, after the death of Biden's son Beau from brain cancer, and while the former president was considering running for the presidency.

The Department of Justice obtained them during Special Counsel Robert Hur's 2023 investigation, which examined Biden's handling of classified materials while serving as vice president between 2009 and 2017. It concluded that the former president handled these materials carelessly but did not commit a crime warranting indictment.

The recordings include Biden reading from personal notebooks containing classified information, while the department under former Attorney General Merrick Garland refused to disclose them, considering that akin to publishing pages from the diary of a suspect who was not charged.

Now, the Heritage Foundation continues its struggle, and the House Judiciary Committee (Republicans) demanded in March their release under the pretext of oversight of the politicization of the Department of Justice under Biden and Garland.

Biden's lawyers assert in the lawsuit that the congressional request is pretextual and carries no genuine legislative purpose, as the materials date back to years before Hur's investigation and shed no light on the politicization of the department, and they accuse the current administration of violating federal privacy laws and using the congressional request as a means to circumvent public records request laws.

The dispute comes after the leak of an audio recording of Biden's interview with Hur last year lasting more than five hours, in which the special counsel described Biden as an elderly man with poor memory if charges were brought against him.