Joe Biden's legal team is preparing to intervene in a federal court case to stop the Justice Department from releasing redacted transcripts and roughly 70 hours of audio recordings from Biden's 2017 interviews with his book ghostwriter, recordings that Special Counsel Robert Hur relied on when he concluded Biden mishandled classified information but declined to prosecute.
The move, disclosed in a court filing reported by Fox News Digital, came just days before a Tuesday deadline for Biden's lawyers to respond. Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate wrote that Biden "through counsel, has advised the Department that he intends to seek to intervene to prevent any such disclosures." The DOJ, Shumate added, "does not oppose intervention."
But the filing paints a picture of a former president's legal team that has dragged its feet for months, and is now scrambling to block material the Trump Justice Department has already agreed to release.
The recordings at issue stem from Biden's interviews with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer for the 2017 memoir Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose. Those sessions became central to Hur's investigation into Biden's retention of classified documents, which were found stored at the Penn Biden Center and in Biden's garage.
Hur's report concluded that Biden read from his notebooks "nearly verbatim" during many of those interviews, sometimes for more than an hour at a stretch. As the Washington Times reported, Hur found Biden read classified notes from national security meetings to Zwonitzer at least three times.
The recordings were obtained as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Mike Howell of the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project. The DOJ filing stated that the department "intends to disclose the written transcript and audio recordings at issue in this matter, with redactions, to Congress, pursuant to a request from the Chair of the House Judiciary Committee, as well as to Plaintiffs."
Biden's team wants to stop all of it, the release to the Heritage Foundation plaintiffs and the production to Congress alike.
Shumate's filing is blunt about the timeline. Biden's counsel spent months negotiating with the DOJ without ever seeking to intervene in the case. Now, with a June 15, 2026, production date looming, Biden has reversed course.
"It appears that after lengthy negotiation covering several months, at no point seeking to intervene into this case on a timely basis, President Biden has changed position and now seeks to even enjoin release of the portions of transcripts that match exact phrases quoted in the Hur Report."
The filing described Biden's lead counsel as "unable to provide any information" about planned submissions, calling the delay "16 months late" and noting that counsel indicated the formal motion to intervene would not arrive until mid-next week, with a request for up to three additional days after that to propose a schedule for relief.
Shumate did not mince words about what that amounts to. The filing states it "smacks of kicking the can down the road to justify delaying the June 15, 2026 production by some form of administrative injunction."
The broader Biden family has faced its own cascade of legal troubles in recent months, including court filings revealing Hunter Biden living abroad and unable to pay his own lawyers.
The Justice Department's handling of these records has been rocky from the start. During earlier stages of the FOIA litigation, DOJ lawyers told a federal judge they did not possess verified transcripts of the Biden-Zwonitzer interviews.
That turned out to be wrong. As Newsmax reported, DOJ attorney Cameron Silverberg later informed the court that the department had located "six electronic files, consisting of a total of 117 pages, that appeared to be verbatim transcripts of a small subset of the Biden-Zwonitzer audio recordings created for the SCO by a court-reporting service."
Just weeks before that discovery, Silverberg had told the court: "We don't have some transcript that's been created by the special counsel that we can attest to its accuracy." National Review noted that the newly found transcripts emerged in FOIA litigation brought by the Heritage Foundation and Judicial Watch, and that the Biden administration had previously invoked executive privilege to block release of the Hur interview audio, a fight that led House Republicans to hold then-Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress.
The pattern is consistent: deny, delay, discover, and then fight to suppress anyway.
Biden spokesman TJ Ducklo told Politico on Sunday that the former president "cooperated fully with special counsel Hur, and 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."
Ducklo added a pointed claim: "The DOJ themselves have said these tapes serve no public interest."
Then came the pivot. Rather than address the substance of the recordings or the filing's accusations of delay, Ducklo turned the argument toward the current administration.
"What's happening now isn't about transparency. It's about politics. If this Administration were genuinely committed to transparency, they would release Volume 2 of Special Counsel Jack Smith's report on Donald Trump's own alleged mishandling of classified documents. That report contains information Americans actually deserve to see."
The deflection is notable. Biden's team is not arguing the recordings are inaccurate. They are not claiming the transcripts are fabricated. They are arguing the material should stay hidden, while simultaneously demanding that different material about a different person be made public. Whatever one thinks of the Jack Smith report, that argument does not address the central question: what is on those tapes, and why is Biden so determined to keep the public from hearing them?
The effort to control the Biden narrative extends beyond the courtroom. Jill Biden's forthcoming memoir promises to "set the record straight" on her husband's exit from the 2024 presidential race, another chapter in a family-wide campaign to manage how the Biden years are remembered.
Hur's investigation concluded that Biden, described by the special counsel as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory", mishandled classified information but should not face prosecution. The recordings and transcripts could provide the public its first direct look at the exchanges that led to that conclusion.
Howell, the Heritage Foundation plaintiff who filed the original FOIA request, told Politico the stakes are clear.
"These tapes will further prove the massive lie regarding Biden's fitness for office and the fact Biden revealed classified information."
Howell also called out the last-minute nature of Biden's legal maneuver, saying: "At the last possible second, and after every delay tactic possible, the autopen is objecting to the American People receiving transparency."
The ghostwriter at the center of the recordings, Mark Zwonitzer, has been the subject of his own legal saga. The House Judiciary Committee subpoenaed Zwonitzer for transcripts and recordings of his interviews with Biden. As the New York Post reported, the committee released a report recommending contempt of Congress charges against Zwonitzer for failing to comply. Hur had noted the recordings carried "significant evidentiary value." Zwonitzer initially agreed to cooperate, then reversed himself and refused to produce documents without a subpoena.
The pattern of resistance, from Biden's legal team, from the DOJ under the previous administration, and from the ghostwriter himself, has stretched across years.
Shumate's filing closes with a statement that frames the stakes plainly. The plaintiffs, he wrote, "regret that they are currently unable to assist the Court in this process due to the repeated failure of counsel for President Biden to engage with Plaintiffs on this matter, putting off even initial substantive conversations until next week."
And then the bottom line, attributed to the filing: "The public deserves to hear the tapes and read the transcripts as redacted by President Donald J. Trump's Department of Justice."
If Biden's lawyers succeed in blocking the release, the June 15 production date would be delayed while the court sorts through intervention motions and scheduling fights. If they fail, the American public will hear for itself what Biden said to his ghostwriter in 2017, and how it squares with what the country was told about his fitness and his handling of classified material.
The Biden family's legal entanglements continue to multiply. Hunter Biden is reportedly dodging $20 million in debts, and the broader Biden orbit remains mired in courtroom disputes that show no sign of resolution.
A man who spent his presidency lecturing the country about norms, transparency, and the rule of law now wants a federal judge to make sure nobody hears the tapes. That tells you more than the tapes probably will.
