Trump DOJ moves to release Biden's private ghostwriter recordings to Heritage Foundation

The Trump Justice Department has reversed the position taken under the Biden administration and notified that it intends to release audio recordings and transcripts of former President Joe Biden's interviews with his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, to the conservative Heritage Foundation and the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee. The materials were gathered by special counsel Robert Hur during his investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents; the Department had previously withheld the audio as exempt from Freedom of Information Act disclosure. The DOJ gave notice that it would hand over the recordings on June 15, 2026 unless a court blocked the release.

The Heritage Foundation had sued for access to the records under FOIA in 2024, and the Department initially defended withholding the audio before reversing course under the new administration. By turning custody of investigative material — collected through a criminal inquiry into a former president and current political rival — over to a partisan think tank and a congressional committee controlled by the president's party, the Department put the machinery of a federal law-enforcement investigation to political use. The recordings reportedly include personal discussions, among them references to the death of Biden's son Beau, which Biden's lawyers cited in arguing that disclosure would be "an unwarranted invasion of President Biden's privacy."

On May 26, 2026, Biden sued the Justice Department to stop the release, a step that made the Department's decision public and is reflected in the event date recorded here; the precise date on which the DOJ communicated its decision in the underlying FOIA litigation is not fixed in the public reporting, though the dispute was already public by mid-May. The discrete abuse recorded is the Department's decision to release the materials, which has occurred; the scheduled June 15 handover remained contingent on the courts as of this archiving. The matter maps to weaponizing the DOJ and to targeting critics with government power.