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 racing against a critical deadline set for Tuesday, aiming to prevent the Trump administration from delivering previously “deleted” but now recovered audiotapes to Congress. These tapes capture conversations between Biden and the ghostwriter of his memoir in 2017.
With the change in administration, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has seen a shift in its priorities and stance. One notable outcome of Biden’s single term in office, coupled with former Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat in the 2024 elections to President Donald Trump, is the current DOJ’s decision to no longer cite concerns about “deepfakes” to block the release of such materials. This change paves the way for the Trump administration to potentially provide Republican lawmakers and conservative groups with ammunition against their political adversaries.
The conservative Heritage Foundation initiated a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit in March 2024, which brought this issue to light. On Friday, a status update was filed in Washington, D.C., with U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich. Both the plaintiff and the DOJ informed the judge that Biden had until Tuesday to act. Failing this, “written transcript and audio recordings at issue in this matter, with redactions,” would be transferred to Congress following a request from the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, as well as to the plaintiffs.
The tapes in question comprise approximately “70 hours of audio recordings” of Biden conversing with Mark Zwonitzer about his book, “Promise Me, Dad.” These recordings were initially deleted but later recovered during Special Counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents related to U.S. “military and foreign policy in Afghanistan.”
In his report on the investigation, Hur indicated there was evidence suggesting Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” post-vice presidency. However, he concluded that DOJ policy prevented charging a sitting president. Furthermore, Hur speculated that a jury would likely not convict Biden, describing him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”—a memory even more impaired than what was evident in the Zwonitzer tapes.
Hur’s report characterized the ghostwriter sessions as “often painfully slow,” with the former vice president “struggling to remember events” and “straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries” several years before he was elected president.
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.