President Joe Biden meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House, Wednesday, Nov. 13, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci).
A federal judge who presided over President Donald Trump's defunct Jan. 6 prosecution held a hearing Tuesday morning in Washington, D.C., in former President Joe Biden's lawsuit to stop the DOJ from releasing audiotapes and transcripts of his ghostwriter sessions.
Law&Crime reported previously that Biden has separately opposed the conservative Heritage Foundation's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, but the case U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan is handling is Biden's attempt to directly block the Trump DOJ from handing the materials to Congress before a June 15 deadline.
After a short introduction of counsel on Tuesday, the Barack Obama-appointed judge promptly recognized that the House Judiciary Committee has a legal right to intervene in a matter where the court has been asked to issue a preliminary injunction potentially "impairing" its "legally cognizable interest in the enforcement of its subpoenas."
"As an initial matter, the committee has standing to intervene," Chutkan said, setting a June 8 deadline for the committee to oppose Biden's motion in a court filing.
Biden has argued that his "private, sensitive conversations with his writing partner" Mark Zwonitzer in the course of creating "Promise Me, Dad" in 2016 and 2017 should stay private, considering that he "cooperated fully" in former special counsel Robert Hur's classified documents investigation — which ended with a conclusion that "criminal charges were not warranted."
FILE – This undated photo provided by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, shows U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan (Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts via AP, File)
When Hur released his report in 2024, the special counsel said there was evidence Biden "willfully retained and disclosed classified materials" but concluded a jury wouldn't convict a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." Additionally, DOJ policy ruled out charging a sitting president and the alleged facts were not as serious as those Trump faced in his since-dismissed Mar-a-Lago classified documents prosecution, Hur said.
"Unlike the evidence involving Mr. Biden, the allegations set forth in the indictment of Mr. Trump, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts," the special counsel's report stated. "Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite."
Chapter 17 of Hur's report specifically addressed the fact that the Zwonitzer tapes were once "deleted" but recovered due to the ghostwriter's candor. Once recovered, the special counsel said, the materials provided "significant evidentiary value" in the probe of documents on U.S. "military and foreign policy in Afghanistan." Hur's report additionally characterized the ghostwriter sessions as "often painfully slow," with the then-former vice president "struggling to remember events" and "straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries" several years before he was elected president.
One of Biden's lawyers on the case is Amy Jeffress, who is married to a federal judge Trump slammed just days ago for ordering the removal of the president's name from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
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