For years, Democrats and their allies in the media swore Joe Biden was sharp as a tack, fully capable, and absolutely fine. Then came the June 2024 debate, and that story collapsed in real time before millions of viewers. The fallout was so bad that Biden's own party forced him off the ticket. He dropped out, spent the rest of his term below the radar, and has spent his post-presidency trying to rehabilitate his image. Now, that effort has taken a new and telling turn.
Biden filed a lawsuit Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking to block the Justice Department from releasing roughly 70 hours of audio recordings and transcripts of interviews he gave to ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer for his 2017 memoir, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose. Those recordings became central to Special Counsel Robert Hur's investigation into Biden's mishandling of classified documents, which found that Biden stored sensitive materials at unsecured locations, even in the garage of his Delaware home.
Hur's February 2024 report concluded that Biden had "willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency," but declined to prosecute him, citing the fact that he would appear to jurors as a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."
Democrats screamed. They called that characterization an unfair smear. Congressional Democrats piled on Hur for even including the mental frailty passages. Biden's own attorney, Bob Bauer, insisted the interview had gone well and the tapes would prove it.
That argument aged poorly.
In May 2025, partial audio from Biden's interview with Hur was released, and it was rough. Awkward pauses. Jumbled recall. Biden struggling to sequence basic events. And in the moment that defined the release, Biden infamously could not remember when his own son Beau died.
Now Biden's legal team is racing to make sure you never hear the rest of it.
Biden and his attorneys have long maintained that the files are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.
The suit comes after three separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits were previously filed attempting to unseal them.
In one suit involving the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, attorneys for the Justice Department told a federal judge earlier this month they planned to release the files, with redactions, to both the committee and the Heritage Foundation on June 15 barring a ruling on the issue.
Mr. Biden asserted executive privilege over the recordings in 2024 after House Republicans attempted to access them.
CBS News has reached out to the Justice Department for comment on the complaint.
In late 2022 and early 2023, classified documents were found at Biden's home in Wilmington, Delaware, as well as his former private office at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, D.C.
His spokesperson, TJ Ducklo, insists this is political and that Biden “agreed to provide audiotapes of conversations with his biographer for a book about his deceased son on the condition that they would not be made public.”
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The public interest argument is hard to make with a straight face. They are audio of a man who held the highest office in the land, a man whose staff and party spent years insisting he was mentally fit, reading classified materials aloud to a ghostwriter, and struggling to recall when things happened. The public absolutely has an interest in that.
For a man whose team spent years insisting there was nothing to hide, he is working awfully hard to hide something.
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