Joe Biden has sued the Department of Justice to block the release of audio recordings of his conversations with the ghostwriter of his memoirs. This is the same Biden who spent decades proclaiming himself a guardian of democracy and transparency. The irony would be comical if it weren't so revealing.
His lawyer's argument is that "every American has a right to privacy in conversations within their own home." That's nice. Except these aren't family dinner conversations—they are recordings made for a memoir intended for public sale. When you decide to turn your life into an editorial product, the line between "private" and "for public consumption" becomes, at the very least, debatable.
And there is a context that cannot be ignored: we already know that the audio from a previous interview confirmed memory lapses that the White House had categorically denied. The first version was a lie. Now Biden wants to ensure that no one hears the second version firsthand. Let's call it what it is: narrative control, not privacy protection.
Yes, Trump is using the state apparatus to humiliate his latest opponent—that is equally true and equally condemnable. But one's guilt does not absolve the other. Both things exist simultaneously.
What this story ultimately reveals is simple: the powerful build public narratives about themselves and sue anyone who tries to verify if those narratives are true. Biden wrote memoirs to shape how history will remember him. But the recordings that fueled those memoirs—those have to stay hidden. It is the best possible summary of how the modern political class conceives of transparency: as an obligation for others, never for themselves.
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