“What you’re going to hear on the tapes […] is the state of Joe Biden years before he ran for president, when a special prosecutor said he has memory issues,” said Jeffrey Clark, vice president for litigation at the Oversight Project, one of the firms pressing for access to the tapes.
Former President Joe Biden has dropped a lawsuit seeking to prevent the public release of a series of recorded interviews provided to a memoir ghostwriter several years ago.
According to The Hill, Biden’s legal team filed a notice of voluntary dismissal in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., earlier this week, shortly after a panel of circuit court judges rejected his request to block the material’s release in a split 2-1 ruling.
The Hill notes that ghostwriter Mark Zwontitzer interviewed Biden for a memoir at his home between 2016 and 2017, shortly before he was elected to the White House.
Attorneys for Biden say that the release of any recorded conversations between Biden and Zwontitzer would “constitute an unwarranted invasion of President Biden’s privacy.”
“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 legal team wrote in a filing. “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, earlier this week, a federal appeals panel found that there was “substantial” public interest in the release of the material.
“We conclude that any remaining incursion on personal privacy from disclosure of the now-redacted materials likely does not outweigh the public interest in disclosure,” Judges Sri Srinivasan and Gregory Katsas wrote for the majority.
Judge Florence Pan, a Biden appointee, penned the lone dissent.
“In my view, Biden has shown a substantial privacy interest,” Pan wrote. “The conversations at issue took place in Biden’s home, and the recordings of them were obtained by the government in the course of a criminal investigation that did not lead to an indictment.”
National Public Radio reports that conservative organizations have pursued the tapes for years, believing that the recordings will validate longstanding and highly-publicized claims that Biden’s mental capacity was diminished even before he was elected president.
“What you’re going to hear on the tapes […] is the state of Joe Biden years before he ran for president, when a special prosecutor said he has memory issues,” said Jeffrey Clark, vice president for litigation at the Oversight Project, one of the firms pressing for access to the tapes.
Clark told NPR that the conservative organizations involved in the lawsuit plan to immediately release any recordings that they obtain.
“We’ll put out a link,” he said. “It’s not more complicated than that.”
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