Former President Joe Biden filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday, seeking to permanently block the government from releasing audio recordings and transcripts of private conversations he held inside his own home in 2016 and 2017. The recordings, made during sessions with his memoir collaborator, were obtained by federal investigators during Special Counsel Robert Hur’s now-closed classified documents investigation — an inquiry that resulted in no criminal charges. The lawsuit, filed May 26 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, sets up a significant legal confrontation between a former president and the sitting administration over privacy, congressional oversight authority, and the limits of the Freedom of Information Act.
The Recordings and How the Government Got Them
The materials at the center of the dispute are audio recordings and transcripts from private conversations Biden held with his writing collaborator, Mark Zwonitzer, between October 2016 and April 2017 at Biden’s Delaware home. The sessions were part of the writing process for his 2017 memoir, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose, which chronicled one of the most consequential and painful years of his life — a period during which he served as Vice President, weighed a run for the presidency, and watched his eldest son, Beau Biden, lose his battle with brain cancer at age 46 on May 30, 2015.
According to the complaint, both Biden and Zwonitzer understood the recordings would be used only for the purpose of writing the memoir and would not be disseminated to the public. Zwonitzer recorded the conversations on an external hard drive for his personal use in assisting Biden with the book. Years later, in 2022, Biden’s personal counsel discovered classified documents from his Vice Presidency stored at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., and immediately reported the discovery. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Special Counsel Robert Hur to investigate in January 2023, and the Special Counsel’s Office obtained the hard drive from Zwonitzer as part of that investigation, even using forensic tools to recover deleted audio recordings.
No Charges — But the Tapes Remained
Special Counsel Hur ultimately concluded that criminal charges against Biden were unwarranted, summarizing his findings in a 345-page report to the Attorney General and concluding that “the evidence did not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.” The report was published by the DOJ on February 8, 2024, and Hur testified publicly before Congress the following month. The day of that testimony, the DOJ also provided Congress with a full transcript of Biden’s five-hour voluntary interview with investigators.
Critically, the materials were obtained subject to a specific written agreement between the White House Counsel’s Office and Special Counsel Hur. That agreement stipulated that the information “will be accessed, reviewed, and used only by the Executive Branch and only for purposes of advancing the investigation” and required that Biden receive “advance notice and a sufficient opportunity to challenge any disclosure” of the materials outside the executive branch, including to Congress. Biden’s lawsuit argues that the current DOJ is now violating both the spirit and the letter of that agreement.
DOJ’s Own Words Now Used Against It
In 2024, the Heritage Foundation — a conservative think tank — submitted a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the Zwonitzer recordings and transcripts, arguing the materials were used in the Hur investigation and therefore subject to public disclosure. The department refused, and the legal fight that followed produced some of the strongest arguments now being wielded by Biden’s legal team — arguments the DOJ made itself.
In the department’s own motion for summary judgment, filed in late 2024, DOJ career attorneys described the privacy interests at stake as “undoubtedly enormous” — comparing release of the materials to “releasing the pages of an unindicted suspect’s diary entries, or the private text messages exchanged on the suspect’s phone — despite no charges having ever been brought, let alone charges relating to that private content.” The department further argued at the time that release of the recordings and transcripts “would constitute a severe invasion of privacy with little to no meaningful or cognizable counterbalancing public interest.”
That position held for nearly two years. Then the Trump administration took office, and everything changed.
The About-Face
On February 25, 2026 — after defending the privacy protections underlying FOIA exemptions for approximately two years — the DOJ’s Office of the Deputy Attorney General informed Biden through counsel that the department now planned to produce the audio recordings and transcripts, with limited redactions, to the Heritage Foundation plaintiffs. No official written explanation for the reversal was provided. According to the lawsuit, the department provided no formal documentation reflecting the consummation of its decision-making for reversing its position.
Biden’s legal team engaged with DOJ attorneys for weeks in an attempt to resolve the matter without litigation. Then, on the evening of March 19, 2026, the situation escalated sharply. An attorney in the DOJ’s Office of the Deputy Attorney General called Biden’s counsel and stated that the department had received a request from Congress and intended to produce the materials to Congress regardless of the outcome of the FOIA lawsuit.
The Jim Jordan Request — and a Timeline Dispute
The congressional request at the center of the new lawsuit came from Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. The written request — dated March 23, 2026 — asked for all audio recordings of any interviews or conversations between Zwonitzer and Biden relating to Zwonitzer’s ghostwriting work on Biden’s memoirs, citing as its purpose “to advance [the Committee’s] oversight of the politicization of the Biden-Garland Department of Justice.”
Biden’s legal team immediately flagged a troubling discrepancy in the timeline. The DOJ had informed Biden’s counsel of the congressional request’s supposed existence on March 19 — four days before the written document is dated. The department represented to Biden’s counsel on March 23 that the request was “received from House Judiciary today,” a claim the lawsuit challenges as inconsistent with the earlier notification. The complaint argues this sequence of events suggests the DOJ itself solicited the request from the committee in order to circumvent the ongoing FOIA litigation.
Jordan addressed the matter in a May 12, 2026 Fox News interview, stating: “I think it’s just important for the American people to know exactly where the President of the United States was. . . . We’d like to see all that information, I think, to underscore what the Democrats were trying to hide just a few years ago.” Biden’s legal team noted that Jordan appeared to misunderstand the scope of the materials, incorrectly stating during the interview that the committee already had the written transcripts and was merely seeking the audio.
What Biden Is Asking the Court to Do
The lawsuit brings three counts against the Justice Department under the Administrative Procedure Act and the Privacy Act. Biden’s legal team argues the DOJ’s reversal was arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion, and contrary to law — all grounds for overturning agency action under federal statute. The complaint contends that the materials “long predate the Special Counsel investigation over which the Committee purports to be conducting oversight and could not possibly shed light on the ‘politicization of the Biden-Garland Department of Justice'” — the committee’s stated rationale for seeking them.
Biden is asking the court to declare the committee’s request pretextual, invalid, and outside the scope of its investigative powers under Article I of the Constitution, and to permanently enjoin the DOJ and its officers from disclosing the materials to the committee. He is also seeking to block the release to the Heritage Foundation in a parallel action. The DOJ has set June 15, 2026 as the release date for both disclosures, absent a court order.
Background: The FOIA Case Already Underway
The Heritage Foundation’s FOIA lawsuit has been ongoing since March 2024. In October 2024, the DOJ issued a partial response and released 117 pages of heavily redacted transcripts of Biden’s conversations with Zwonitzer. After summary judgment briefing concluded in December 2024, the case was largely dormant until a court-ordered status report in September 2025 prompted the DOJ to signal it was reviewing its withholding positions.
Biden first moved to intervene in that separate Heritage Foundation case on May 12, 2026. A court allowed Biden to join the case on May 21, 2026, but barred him from pursuing certain claims — leading him to file this new, separate lawsuit to assert the additional legal arguments the court had restricted in the FOIA action. The two cases are now running in parallel, with Biden’s legal team — led by attorney Amy Jeffress of Hecker Fink LLP — pressing for emergency injunctive relief in both ahead of the June 15 deadline.
Privacy Principles at Stake
At its core, the lawsuit raises a question that extends well beyond the specifics of Biden’s memoir recordings: when the government obtains private information about an individual through a criminal investigation that ends with no charges, what obligations does it carry to protect that information from public exposure?
Bradley Weinsheimer, a former Associate Deputy Attorney General with over two decades of federal prosecutorial experience, stated in a declaration filed during the FOIA litigation that “when no charges are filed, evidence gathered from private individuals that reveals their private conduct can be expected to be kept confidential, especially when that information may be highly personal,” and that “the Department takes great care to protect its law enforcement files, consistent with the law, even in closed cases, remaining sensitive to the privacy and reputational interests of uncharged parties.” Biden’s complaint notes that those statements “were, and continue to be, accurate” — and that the only thing that has changed since they were filed is the party occupying the White House.