President Trump unleashed a blistering attack on his predecessor President Joe Biden, who sued the Justice Department in a bid to block the release of audio recordings and transcripts of his interview with a ghostwriter that were obtained by the special counsel who probed his handling of classified documents. 

“A crooked politician,” Trump wrote in a three-word rebuke on Truth Social Tuesday.

Trump hurled the jab at Biden, 83, after the ex-president’s legal team filed a lawsuit claiming the DOJ intended to release the files to Congress and the conservative outlet the Heritage Foundation after the department had previously argued that the docs were exempt from disclosure under the public records law.

Biden’s lawyers argued that the disclosure would “constitute an unwarranted invasion of President Biden’s privacy.”

“Every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home,” his attorneys wrote. “And when the U.S. Department of Justice obtains that private information through a criminal investigation, the Department bears a particular responsibility to protect it from disclosure.”

At issue in the case are audio recordings and transcripts of Biden’s interviews at his home in 2016 and 2017 with Mark Zwonitzer, who worked with Biden on his two memoirs.

The files were scrutinized by special counsel Robert Hur as part of his investigation into the president’s improper retention of classified documents, from his time as a senator and as vice president.

Hur’s yearlong investigation led to a 388-page report, which the DOJ released on Feb. 8, 2024, that questioned Biden’s age and mental competence but recommended no criminal charges against the then-81-year-old. Hur said he found insufficient evidence to successfully prosecute a case in court.

“We conclude that no criminal charges are warranted in this matter,” Hur’s report revealed. “We conclude the same even if there was no policy against charging a sitting president.”

But his report was damning, particularly as the special counsel “uncovered evidence that President Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified information after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.”

“These materials included (1) marked classified documents about military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, and (2) notebooks containing Mr. Biden’s handwritten entries about issues of national security and foreign policy implicating sensitive intelligence sources and methods,” the report said.

The FBI recovered such documents from the “garage, offices and basement den” in Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home. 

Hur’s report also painted a damning indictment of Biden’s mental competence, describing the then-president’s memory as “significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017, and in his interview with our office in 2023.”

Hur’s report suggests that if the case went to trial, Biden would try to “present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” 

That led the lawyer to believe “it would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

Biden has separately fought the release of the audio of his interview with Hur.

The House in 2024 voted to hold Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over that audio after the White House invoked executive privilege, shielding it from Congress.

The transcripts of five hours of Biden interviews with federal prosecutors were released that same year.

While Biden was adamant that he treated classified information seriously, the transcript shows that he was at times fuzzy about dates and details and he said he was unfamiliar with the paper trail for some of the sensitive documents he handled.

Republicans have argued Biden was being given a pass by his own Justice Department and that Trump had been unfairly victimized by prosecutors.

Democrats, for their part, stressed Biden’s cooperation in the investigation and strongly contrasted that with the separate criminal case against Trump, who was accused of refusing to return classified documents requested by the National Archives that he had at his Florida estate.

With Post wires