Trump reacts to Biden lawsuit over DOJ interview recordings
Donald Trump responds to questions about Joe Biden suing the DOJ to block release of recorded interview tapes.
President Donald Trump is in favor of the Department of Justice’s decision to release audio recordings and transcripts of Joe Biden‘s private conversations with the ghostwriter of his 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose” after the former president recently sued the department in an attempt to block the materials’ release.
“I’d like to see it,” Trump said while speaking to a reporter during a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday, May 27. “I would like to see what he has to say because we can never allow what happened to this country to happen. The man was grossly incompetent.”
Trump added Democrats came “very close to destroying our country” due to their “bad” policy.
Earlier, in a May 26 post on Truth Social, Trump had weighed in on the lawsuit by calling Biden “a Crooked Politician.”
Why is Joe Biden suing the DOJ?
Biden, in a lawsuit filed Tuesday, May 26, in the U.S. District Court for Washington, DC, is seeking to “halt the Department’s plan” to release his private information, which “the Department has long maintained is exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), in response to a purported request from the House Judiciary Committee.”
Biden’s attorney Amy Jeffress, in the lawsuit, argues the request to release her client’s private information is “pretextual, lacks a legitimate legislative purpose, is outside the scope of the Committee’s investigative powers, and is invalid and unenforceable.”
However, since the department intends to release the information to the Committee on June 15 without a court order, Biden “now seeks judicial review to stop the Department’s proposed end-run around pending FOIA litigation and to hold the Department to its obligations to safeguard sensitive and highly personal law enforcement information,” the lawsuit states.
DOJ says it will ‘fight’ to release recordings
DOJ, in an email to USA TODAY on May 27, responded to Biden’s lawsuit, saying that “Joe Biden’s Justice Department tried to hide audio recordings that clearly demonstrate a significant decline in his cognitive abilities as far back as 2016.”
“This is the most transparent Department of Justice in history, and we will fight to ensure the American people can hear these recordings and draw their own conclusions about the former President’s mental acuity before he sought the presidency,” it said.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington, DC, filed a request, and later a lawsuit in 2024 under the Freedom of Information Act, to obtain Biden’s conversation with Mark Zwonitzer from when they were writing the memoir, described as “private, sensitive conversations” in Biden’s lawsuit.
The foundation’s request was in…
Read More: Trump responds to Biden’s lawsuit against DOJ on memoir conversations
