(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today it filed a reply brief asking a federal court to expeditiously rule in Judicial Watch’s favor and order the Biden Justice Department to produce within 14 days the audio recordings of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interviews of President Biden in the criminal investigation into Biden’s theft and disclosure of classified […]
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(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today it filed a reply brief asking a federal court to expeditiously rule in Judicial Watch’s favor and order the Biden Justice Department to produce within 14 days the audio recordings of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interviews of President Biden in the criminal investigation into Biden’s theft and disclosure of classified records. (Judicial Watch, Heritage Foundation, Cable News Network, Inc., et al v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:24-cv-00700-TJK))
On March 11, 2024, Judicial Watch filed its FOIA lawsuit against the Department of Justice in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the Department of Justice failed to respond to a February 2024 FOIA request for records of all Special Counsel interviews of President Biden (Judicial Watch, Inc. v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:24-cv-00700)).
Although a redacted transcript of the Biden interview was released on April 15 in response to Judicial Watch’s lawsuit, the public has a significant interest in hearing the audio recordings “because an open question remains about whether Special Counsel Hur’s conclusion that President Biden should not be prosecuted for his mishandling of classified records [and] is supported by the evidence.”
The Biden Justice Department, in seeking to keep the audio recordings secret, asked the court to ignore precedent and rewrite FOIA law. The Biden agency: demands that a law enforcement/executive privilege exemption be rewritten to help Joe Biden; wants to change FOIA law to protect (after 50 years of being a politician) President Joe Biden’s privacy in his voice; and seeks to potentially end FOIA with a new argument that the possible “AI” alteration of the Hur recordings is reason to keep the recordings and any government record a secret from the public.
As Judicial Watch explains in its latest filing, the Justice Department continues to baselessly assert executive privilege; “doubles down” on its insufficient argument of “potential harm to unspecified and undefined ongoing investigations;” and engages in unsupported speculation on “concerns that the release of the audio recordings could reasonably be expected to chill cooperation with future high-profile law enforcement investigations.”
Judicial Watch states that, in its continued withholding of the recordings, the Justice Department wrongly argues that FOIA “allows for it to withhold the audio recordings that contain the voice of the President of the United States, who has been an elected federal officeholder for more than 50 years, speaking the same substantive information contained in the transcripts.”
Even though President Biden is no longer running for re-election, Judicial Watch states, “the substantial public interest in determining whether the Special Counsel “pulled any punches” (or even “swung too far”) when investigating President Biden remains.”
“The Biden Justice Department wants to destroy FOIA in order to protect Joe Biden,” stated Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “In our 30 years of work, Judicial Watch has never seen such a dishonest assault on the people’s right to know. The Court can’t order the release of the Biden tapes soon enough.”
The Heritage Foundation and a CNN-led media coalition lawsuits have been joined with Judicial Watch’s lawsuit.
On February 5, 2024, Special Counsel Robert Hur issued the “Report of the Special Counsel on the Investigation Into Unauthorized Removal, Retention, and Disclosure of Classified Documents Discovered at Locations Including the Penn Biden Center and the Delaware Private Residence of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.”
In the report, Hur called Biden a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and declined to charge Biden with a “serious felony:”
We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him-by then a former president well into his eighties-of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.
Judicial Watch has several ongoing FOIA lawsuits about Biden’s document scandals and the related unprecedented partisan prosecutorial and judicial abuses of former President Donald J. Trump.
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