(Ken Silva, Headline USA) Former President Joe Biden has sued the Justice Department to prevent it from releasing transcripts and audio of interviews he conducted with his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, for his 2017 memoir.
The DOJ obtained the interview materials in 2023 as part of then-Special Counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden for mishandling classified documents. Hur eventually declined to press charges, in part because he thought Biden would present himself to a jury as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Since the investigation is now closed, the House Judiciary Committee and the Heritage Foundation have both sought the transcripts and audio of Biden’s interviews with Zwonitzer. But Biden said in his lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court, that disclosing those materials would violate his privacy.
The conversations reflected in these audio recordings and transcripts were part of the writing process for President Biden’s 2017 memoir, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose, in which he recounted the politically consequential and personally painful year of his life that began on Thanksgiving in 2014,” Biden’s lawsuit says.
“The public and private dimensions of President Biden’s life have always been intertwined, but perhaps never more so than during that difficult year. President Biden and Zwonitzer recorded their conversations for use in writing Promise Me, Dad, and they both understood that they were speaking privately.”
Even if Biden’s lawsuit is ultimately unsuccessful, it’s unclear how much material remains from his interviews with Zwonitzer. That’s because the ghostwriter destroyed recordings once he found out that Hur was investigating Biden, as Bloomberg revealed in June 2024.
Indeed, according to a heavily redacted transcript of the FBI’s interview with Zwonitzer, agents accused him of obstruction because he destroyed recordings. But because of the heavy redactions of the FBI’s interview transcript, it’s unclear how exactly the line of questioning went, or what Zwonitzer destroyed.
Hur said in a February 2024 report that he didn’t charge Zwonitzer, either, because “the ghostwriter offered plausible, innocent reasons for why he deleted the recordings.”
Ken Silva is the editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/jd_cashless.
