Joe Biden is suing his own Justice Department. He wants to block the release of audio and transcripts from his chats with a ghostwriter. The special counsel grabbed these files during the classified documents probe. Now, the DOJ wants to hand them over to Congress and the conservative Heritage Foundation. Biden’s lawyers are furious. They claim the department is pulling a massive U-turn after previously arguing the files were legally shielded from public eyes.
It’s a privacy fight. “Every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home,” his legal team wrote in the D.C. federal court filing. They argue the government has a duty to protect seized personal data. The files in question feature Biden talking to Mark Zwonitzer back in 2016 and 2017. Zwonitzer was helping him write his memoirs.
Enter Robert Hur. The special counsel spent a year digging into how Biden ended up with classified files from his Senate and VP days. Hur’s final 345-page report was a political hand grenade. It painted the president as a well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. No charges were filed. Hur admitted he couldn’t win a conviction.
This is not Biden’s first tape fight. He previously blocked the release of his direct interviews with Hur. That move got Attorney General Merrick Garland held in contempt of Congress. The White House used executive privilege as a shield. While the actual transcripts of those five-hour sessions eventually leaked—showing a president who was indeed fuzzy on dates and document trails—the raw audio remains locked away.
The fallout is entirely predictable. Republicans smell a cover-up. They claim the DOJ is coddling Biden while throwing the book at Donald Trump. Democrats scream false equivalence. They point out that Biden cooperated with investigators, whereas Trump allegedly hid boxes of secrets at Mar-a-Lago and fought the National Archives at every turn. It is a classic Washington mud fight. Nobody wins, but the lawyers get paid.
