Former Vice President Joe Biden filed a federal lawsuit on May 26, 2026, aimed at preventing the Justice Department from turning over audio recordings and transcripts documenting memory struggles during interviews conducted between 2016 and 2017, material that contributed to the collapse of his 2024 reelection campaign.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., targets a planned June 15 disclosure of the materials to the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee and the conservative Heritage Foundation. The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, an appointee of President Donald Trump.
Biden’s effort to block the congressional portion of the release had already been constrained: on May 21, a federal judge allowed him to join the Heritage Foundation case but barred him from pursuing claims related to the House Judiciary Committee’s request for the same materials, prompting the separate lawsuit filed days later. The recordings capture conversations Biden had with Mark Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter who helped write his 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose,” between 2016 and 2017 as he was finishing his term as Barack Obama’s vice president.
Special counsel Robert Hur later obtained those tapes as part of his investigation into Biden’s retention of classified documents. Hur spent five hours questioning Biden in the days following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. His 345-page report, released in February 2024, found that Biden had “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen,” including records related to military and foreign policy in Afghanistan. Though Hur chose not to file charges, his characterization of Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” sparked a political firestorm that ultimately helped drive Biden from the race. He withdrew months later and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who went on to lose to Donald Trump and J.D. Vance in November.
A Reversal Inside the Justice Department
Biden’s legal team, led by attorney Amy Jeffress, argues in the complaint that the Justice Department defended the privacy of those recordings for years, only to reverse course under President Trump, after long maintaining the materials were exempt from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) disclosure.
In February 2026, the department informed Biden’s lawyers it planned to hand over the audio and transcripts to the Heritage Foundation plaintiffs. On May 5, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General made it official: the materials would be released on June 15 with only limited redactions, going to both the Heritage Foundation and Congress. The materials amount to approximately 70 hours of audio files and transcripts.
The lawsuit contends the shift came without formal justification and violates fundamental privacy rights. “President Biden—like every American—has a right to privacy in personal conversations he had within his own home,” the suit states, describing the planned disclosure as an “unwarranted invasion of President Biden’s privacy.”
The Hur Report and Its Fallout
The Heritage Foundation filed its FOIA request in 2024, seeking the underlying documentation Hur cited in the most damaging portions of his report — passages describing the interview as “painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.” The transcript revealed Biden occasionally confused dates and details, and admitted unfamiliarity with the paper trail for some sensitive documents he had possessed.
Biden fought back hard when the report became public. “My memory is fine,” he told reporters at a February 2024 press conference, pointing out his Hur interview occurred as he was “in the middle of handling an international crisis.” A portion of the audio leaked in 2025, contradicting earlier White House denials about the memory lapses the recordings appeared to document.
Republicans used the report to claim Biden was receiving preferential treatment from his own Justice Department. The Republican-led House voted in 2024 to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress after the White House invoked executive privilege to block lawmakers from accessing the audio.
Trump’s Justice Department Takes a Different Approach
A Justice Department spokesperson defended the new disclosure plan as a correction of past overreach. The previous administration, the spokesperson said, “tried to hide audio recordings that clearly demonstrate a significant decline in his cognitive abilities as far back as 2016.” Trump’s Justice Department, the spokesperson added, would “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.”
An Echo of the Trump Documents Case
The legal battle carries a notable irony. Trump himself was investigated by special counsel Jack Smith over classified documents he removed to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida — a case dismissed by Judge Aileen Cannon. Trump has repeatedly called Biden a “Crooked Politician” over his own handling of classified material.
Jeffress stressed in the suit that the Zwonitzer recordings covered a period beginning at Thanksgiving 2014 — “among the most consequential of President Biden’s political life and the most painful of his personal life,” a reference to the death of his son Beau. The lawsuit notes the Justice Department secured that material only because it launched a criminal investigation.
Biden has maintained a limited public schedule since leaving office, most recently delivering remarks at a Chicago tribute for civil rights leader Jesse Jackson on March 6. Without a judge’s intervention, the recordings he has fought for years to shield will be delivered to his political opponents on June 15.