Former President Joe Biden intends to intervene in litigation to block the Trump administration’s effort to release 70 hours of partially redacted audio recordings of interviews he conducted in 2017 with a ghostwriter who worked with Biden on his memoirs, the Justice Department indicated in new court papers.

DOJ lawyers told a federal judge in Washington on Friday that they expected Biden would seek to “prevent any such disclosures” of the audio tapes to Congress and to the conservative Heritage Foundation, which sued last year to access the materials.

Justice Department attorneys advised U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich that they set a deadline of Tuesday for Biden to take legal action to block the release and agreed to hold off any disclosure until June 15 if Biden does go to court before this week’s deadline.

A spokesperson for Biden confirmed Sunday that he plans to resist release of the audio to the public or to lawmakers.

“President Biden cooperated fully with Special Counsel Hur, and agreed to provide audiotapes of conversations with his biographer for a book about his deceased son on the condition that they would not be made public,” Biden spokesperson TJ Ducklo said in a statement. “The DOJ themselves have said these tapes serve no public interest.”

“What's happening now isn't about transparency. It's about politics,” Ducklo continued. “If this Administration were genuinely committed to transparency, they would release Volume 2 of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on Donald Trump's own alleged mishandling of classified documents. That report contains information Americans actually deserve to see.”

A Heritage official said it will keep up the fight to make the information public.

“These tapes will further prove the massive lie regarding Biden's fitness for office and the fact Biden revealed classified information,” said Mike Howell, president of Heritage’s Oversight Project. “The shenanigans aren't over: At the last possible second, and after every delay tactic possible, the autopen is objecting to the American People receiving transparency. “

The audio was obtained by investigators working with special counsel Robert Hur. Hur was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland in 2023 after classified information was found in files from a think tank Biden was affiliated with after leaving the vice presidency and in files at his Delaware home. Hur ultimately decided not to charge Biden. DOJ policy bars charging a sitting president, but the prosecutor said he wouldn’t have sought charges anyway due to Biden’s “poor memory” and his cooperation with the probe.

Audio of Biden’s interview with Hur was leaked publicly last year and then officially released. During the Biden administration, DOJ opposed release of audio of Biden’s exchanges with the prosecutor, arguing that it could be weaponized in social media and elsewhere.

The audio DOJ now intends to release includes Biden reading to Marc Zwonitzer from notebooks that officials later determined contained classified information. According to quotes from those exchanges in Hur’s report, the recordings also feature Biden telling the ghostwriter: “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”

Biden has been adamant that he did not tell Zwonitzer anything that was classified.

“I did not share classified information,” the then-president insisted to reporters in February 2024. “Guarantee you, I did not.”

The recordings and transcripts DOJ plans to make public are expected to be edited for privacy reasons and to remove the alleged classified information.

Zwonitzer attempted to delete the recordings, but investigators were able to recover them, according to Hur’s report. The ghostwriter was granted immunity by prosecutors so that he would share his account of what transpired.

It’s unclear what legal arguments Biden’s attorneys plan to make to try to block the release. They could try to block the disclosure in the FOIA suit by claiming it would invade Biden’s privacy or that the audio and transcripts are his personal records, not federal ones. However, those arguments are unlikely to stymie a release to Congress.

To prevent that disclosure, the former president would likely have to contend that lawmakers are unfairly targeting him because he served as president and that the information sought is unlikely to be necessary for any legislation Congress might consider.

In a 2020 Supreme Court ruling on a House panel’s request for President Donald Trump’s tax returns, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority: “Congressional demands for the President’s papers can implicate the relationship between the branches regardless whether those papers are personal or official.”

The justices ultimately sent the case back to a lower court to weigh the House's need for the information against Trump's interest in avoiding harassment and intrusion on executive prerogatives.

Lawmakers eventually received two years of Trump's returns, rather than the decade worth they originally sought.