House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed President Joe Biden‘s ghostwriter on Friday for records related to past work the writer did for the president that may have involved classified material.
The subpoena, issued to Mark Zwonitzer and reviewed by the Washington Examiner, asked the ghostwriter to hand over the requested material, including communications, work contracts, and recordings and transcripts of interviews he had with Biden, by April 12.
Zwonitzer worked for months with Biden to help write his 2017 memoir, Promise Me, Dad, but former special counsel Robert Hur found during a yearlong investigation that Biden had inappropriately disclosed classified information to Zwonitzer during the book writing process.
Hur also found that after Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed him to investigate Biden’s handling of classified material, Zwonitzer attempted to delete audio recordings he had saved of interviews with Biden. The special counsel said the FBI was able to recover the recordings, however.
Jordan noted in a letter to Zwonitzer that the day the Department of Justice published Hur’s report, on Feb. 8, Biden held a press conference during which he “denied sharing classified information with you during your work as his ghostwriter,” a point that Hur’s report “unequivocally” contradicted.
Jordan also directly questioned Hur about Zwonitzer in a hearing this month, probing further into Hur’s revelation that Biden had “strong motivations” to retain classified material, including about his contributions to U.S. policy in Afghanistan, to help with his memoir.
Hur had found that over the course of hours of interviews, Biden would “read aloud from his notebooks in his private home,” and Biden “provided raw material to his ghostwriter detailing meetings and events that would be of interest to prospective readers and buyers of his book.”
Hur noted Biden worked for several months with Zwonitzer on the book and that the president received an $8 million advance on it.
“The very guy who was helping Joe Biden get the $8 million … the motive for Joe Biden to disclose classified information, to retain classified information, which he definitely knew was against the law. When you get named special counsel, what’s that guy do? He destroys the evidence,” Jordan said of Zwonitzer during the hearing. “That’s the key takeaway in my mind.”
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Jordan told Zwonitzer he was issuing the subpoena to him after the ghostwriter’s attorney Louis Freeman initially signaled to Congress that his client would voluntarily provide the requested material but then days later reneged on the offer and said Zwonitzer would only provide the material if it was subpoenaed.
Freeman did not respond to a request for comment.
