President Joe Biden meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci).
Former President Joe Biden is up against a significant deadline on Tuesday as he attempts to prevent the Trump administration from providing Congress with audiotapes of conversations he had in 2017 with the ghostwriter of his memoir. These tapes, previously thought to be deleted, have now been recovered.
With the shift in presidential administrations, priorities and legal positions within the Department of Justice (DOJ) tend to change. Following Biden’s single term and former Vice President Kamala Harris’s 2024 election defeat to President Donald Trump, the current DOJ no longer cites concerns over “deepfakes” to argue against the release of such materials. The Trump administration now seems poised to supply Republican lawmakers and conservative groups with information potentially damaging to Biden and his allies.
On Friday, a significant development emerged from a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit initiated by the conservative Heritage Foundation in March 2024. Both the plaintiff, the Heritage Foundation, and the DOJ informed U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich in Washington, D.C., that Biden has until Tuesday to act. If he fails to do so, “written transcript and audio recordings at issue in this matter, with redactions,” will be released to Congress, following a request from the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, as well as to the plaintiffs.
The tapes in question include “70 hours of audio recordings” featuring Biden in conversation with Mark Zwonitzer about his book, “Promise Me, Dad.” These recordings were deleted but later recovered during special counsel Robert Hur’s probe into Biden’s handling of classified documents related to U.S. military and foreign policy in Afghanistan.
In his report on the classified documents investigation, special counsel Hur stated that there was evidence suggesting Biden had “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” after his vice presidency. However, DOJ policy barred charging a sitting president, and Hur concluded that a jury would likely not convict Biden, describing him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” noting his memory appeared even more impaired in the Zwonitzer tapes.
Hur’s report depicted the ghostwriting sessions as “often painfully slow,” highlighting Biden’s difficulties in recalling events and his struggles to read and convey his own notes several years before his presidency.
While the complaint in the Heritage Foundation’s case said from the start that the public has an interest in learning more about Biden’s “mental faculties and memory,” it took a change in DOJ leadership for the finish line to come into view.
“President Biden, through counsel, has advised the Department that he intends to seek to intervene to prevent any such disclosures. The Department does not oppose intervention. If President Biden does not seek to intervene on or before May 12, the Department will disclose the material shortly thereafter,” the status report explained. “Otherwise, the Department will disclose the material on June 15.”
As Law&Crime previously reported, the Biden administration DOJ had repeatedly rebuffed the initial wave of demands from media organizations and conservative groups for tapes of the then-president’s five-hour interview with Hur.
As parties sought to learn more in the “public interest” ahead of the election, the Biden administration argued “malicious” actors would create “deepfakes” of the president saying things he did not say.
The prior administration also argued that releasing audiotapes would inappropriately “second-guess” Hur’s non-charging recommendation and “threaten critical law enforcement interests by chilling the potential cooperation of witnesses in current and future sensitive investigations.”
Months later, and on the heels of a much-maligned June 2024 debate performance, Biden announced he would not run for reelection.
To hear the plaintiff Heritage Foundation tell it, nothing should really stand in the way of the public being able to “hear the tapes and read the transcripts as redacted by President Donald J. Trump’s Department of Justice.”
Claiming that Biden’s strategy “smacks of kicking the can down the road” in the name of delay, the Heritage Foundation argued that it would be “unfair to Plaintiffs and the Department” and “massively unfair to this Court, which is being presented with an emergency procedural morass,” to allow Biden’s belated intervention.
Notably, Jeffrey Clark entered the case on behalf of the plaintiffs on the same day the status report was filed.
At least one Biden spokesperson has reportedly reacted to the latest events by pointing out that the DOJ has moved to bury Jack Smith’s report on the Mar-a-Lago classified documents probe of Trump.
