Biden sues justice department to block release of Hur interview audio

Joe Biden , the former president, has filed a lawsuit to try to prevent the justice department (DoJ) from releasing transcripts and audio of interviews that exposed his frequent memory lapses and helped derail his 2024 re-election campaign. The decade-old conversations with the author of his biography ended up in the hands of Robert Hur, the special counsel who was appointed to look into allegations Biden improperly handled classified documents. Hur evaluated the files, and also spent five hours interviewing Biden himself, concluding in a 2024 report to Congress that there was no criminal wrongdoing, but portraying the then 81-year-old president as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”. Biden withdrew from the 2024 election following repeated questioning of his age and mental competence, and endorsed Kamala Harris as the ultimately unsuccessful Democratic nominee. His lawsuit, filed Tuesday in federal court in Washington DC, accuses the DoJ of an “unwarranted invasion of President Biden’s privacy”. It seeks to halt the department, which once fought to keep the transcripts and recordings secret, from handing them over to the Republican-controlled House judiciary committee and conservative Heritage Foundation. …