Biden Drops Lawsuit, Clears Way for Release of Memoir Conversations

Former President Joe Biden has dropped a lawsuit that sought to keep secret his conversations with the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir, days after an appeals court narrowly ruled they should be made public. The move sets the stage for the audio recordings and transcripts to be released to a Republican-led congressional committee that’s been seeking the material, which the Justice Department obtained during a probe of Biden’s handling of classified documents from before he was president, The Associated Press said Saturday.

Biden’s decision to voluntarily dismiss his lawsuit against the DOJ on Friday was first reported Saturday by The Hill. In the lawsuit, Biden’s lawyers contended that releasing his interviews by writer Mark Zwonitzer in 2016 and 2017, for the book Promise Me, Dad, could “constitute an unwarranted invasion of President Biden’s privacy,” according to The Hill. Their chats took place after Biden served as vice president under President Barack Obama and before he was elected president in 2020.

“Every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home,” Biden’s lawyers wrote. “And when the U.S. Department of Justice obtains that private information through a criminal investigation, the Department bears a particular responsibility to protect it from disclosure.”

But a panel of federal appellate judges ruled 2-1 against Biden on Monday, with the majority saying that “any remaining incursion on personal privacy from disclosure of the now-redacted materials likely does not outweigh the public interest in disclosure.”

The recordings and transcripts were obtained by then-special counsel Robert Hur, who in February 2024 declined to file charges against Biden over the classified material he retained and disclosed from his time as vice president and a longtime Democratic senator from Delaware. Hur said that the evidence didn’t establish “guilt beyond a reasonable doubt” and that Biden would likely appear to jurors “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”