Biden Sues DOJ in Attempt to Protect His 'Right to Privacy'
The president whose administration spied on lawmakers and Catholic families is now suing the Department of Justice over his “right to privacy” over taped interviews.
On Tuesday, former President Joe Biden filed a lawsuit against the DOJ to block plans to release recordings of the then-former vice president speaking with his ghostwriter.
The 2017 recordings, which yielded the ghostwritten memoir “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose,” have been the subject of a 2024 Freedom of Information Act request by the Heritage Foundation, according to NBC News.
Biden’s lawyers say that the recordings, for a book that was structured around his son’s death from cancer, took place “among the most consequential [years] of President Biden’s political life and the most painful of his personal life.” Such personal information is exempt from FOIA laws, the lawyers argue.
The Tuesday filings reveal that in February, “without any formal explanation for its about-face, the Department notified President Biden of its intention to release the audio recordings and transcripts to the plaintiffs in the FOIA Action,” NBC reported.
Then, on May 5, “the Office of the Deputy Attorney General informed President Biden, through counsel, that the Department had made a final decision to release the materials, with limited redactions, to the Heritage Plaintiffs and to Congress on June 15.”
However, the Heritage Foundation is adamant that Biden’s conversations with Mark Zwonitzer are critical to understanding special counsel Robert Hur’s report into Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified information, and asked the judge to allow them to be released.
The Hur report concluded that during the recordings, Biden frequently read from notebooks that contained information from classified briefings on military and intelligence matters.
The report recommended not charging Biden with mishandling classified information — although not because he hadn’t, but rather because, to use the language of the report, Biden would come across “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” to a jury. It also described him as “painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.”
This report, by the by, was issued back in February 2024, when Uncle Joe was still fighting to stay in the White House until January of 2029. The administration pushed back vigorously against the charge that he was a confused senescent for months and months, until this happened:
Needless to say, the drugs didn’t work. pic.twitter.com/3lYHnU476w
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) June 28, 2024
Ergo, this isn’t just some old, musty interview about Biden’s most personal moments that’s being sought on spurious grounds. There’s pretty obviously a public interest involving a public figure and a very public allegation.
Let us not forget, too, that this is the same Joe Biden whose Department of Justice — along with its various tendrils and surrogates — was perfectly happy to invade the privacy of everyday Americans.
Traditionalist Catholic? Biden’s FBI called you a threat and treated you accordingly.
Parents who get too uppity about the state treating their children like property? Also a threat!
Even Congressmen weren’t immune despite the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution. As part of the expansive Jan. 6 investigation by special counsel Jack Smith, lawmakers had their calls recorded, which is pretty blatantly unconstitutional.
The FBI even raided Donald Trump’s home in the Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, on a claim that he did the exact same thing that Biden did. (Melania Trump’s right to privacy in her underwear drawer weren’t taken into account.)
But now listen to Biden’s attorney, Amy Jeffress: “Every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home.”
The hypocrisy would be laugh-inducing if it weren’t so galling.
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