House Judiciary Committee subpoenas Biden ghostwriter who reviewed classified files
The House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena Friday to President Biden’s ghostwriter, who was revealed by federal investigators to have had classified material disclosed to him by the former vice president — and deleted recordings of an interview that revealed the sensitive information.
Judiciary chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) sent a letter informing the attorney representing Mark Zwonitzer, who helped compile Biden’s 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad,” of the subpoena and demanding the ghostwriter hand over records related to his work for Biden to the committee, according to a copy of the missive obtained by The Post.
Zwonitzer’s attorney, Louis Freeman of Manhattan-based Freeman, Nooter and Ginsberg, had initially promised to turn in documents related to the memoir by March 8 — but blew through that deadline and later told the Judiciary panel he “would not produce the documents without a subpoena,” the letter shows.
Freeman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It’s unclear whether the records would provide further evidence for House Republicans’ ongoing impeachment inquiry into Biden, but a portion of their investigation focuses on the Justice Department’s alleged interference into a five-year tax probe of first son Hunter Biden.
Jordan in his letter wrote that the Judiciary panel has “jurisdiction to conduct oversight over criminal justice matters in the United States to inform potential legislative reforms.”
Zwonitzer conducted several recorded interviews with Biden in 2017, during which the former vice president read “nearly verbatim” from notebooks that contained sensitive national security and foreign policy, according to a report by special counsel Robert Hur.
Zwonitzer deleted the recordings sometime after Hur was appointed in January 2023 to investigate whether the president had mishandled the classified material.
“The recordings had significant evidentiary value,” Hur wrote in his 388-page report, adding that he “considered whether to charge the ghostwriter with obstruction of justice” but decided against it.
“Zwonitzer preserved near-verbatim transcripts that contain incriminating information about Mr. Biden, including transcripts of the February 16, 2017 conversation where Mr. Biden said he ‘just found all the classified stuff downstairs,” Hur said, calling the act “inconsistent with an intent to impede an investigation by destroying evidence.”
“And the ghostwriter voluntarily produced to investigators his notes and the devices from which the recordings were recovered” by the FBI, the special counsel added.
Hur also declined to prosecute the 81-year-old president, in part because he said a jury would view Biden “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
During a March 12 House Judiciary hearing, Hur insisted that his report “did not exonerate” Biden and clearly states that the president “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials.”
Biden’s attorneys notified the National Archives that some of the classified documents had been found at his former personal office in Washington, DC, while others were later seized by the FBI during a search of his Wilmington, Del., home.
Former President Donald Trump was criminally charged in June 2023 for allegedly conspiring to obstruct justice and conceal national security documents from federal authorities at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla.
