A federal appeals court has dealt Joe Biden a significant legal defeat in his fight to keep secret the audio recordings of his private conversations with a memoir ghostwriter, recordings that special counsel Robert Hur relied on when he described the former president as an elderly man with a poor memory and diminished faculties.
In a divided 2-1 ruling issued late on a Monday, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected Biden’s request to block the release of the recordings and transcripts, finding there is a “substantial” public interest in disclosing the material that the former president has fought for months to keep hidden from the American people.
The recordings at the center of the case date back to 2016 and 2017, when Biden sat down with his biographer, Mark Zwonitzer, while working on his memoir “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose.” Those conversations took on new significance years later after special counsel Hur obtained them during his investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents from his time as a senator and vice president.
Hur’s 2024 report ultimately declined to recommend criminal charges against Biden, but the reasoning behind that decision proved just as politically explosive as any indictment would have been. Prosecutors wrote that Biden would likely present himself to a jury as a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory, someone many jurors would want to give the benefit of the doubt. Investigators went further, describing Biden’s conversations with Zwonitzer as painfully slow, with the president struggling to remember events and straining to read his own notebook entries.
Those written characterizations alone fueled enormous scrutiny of Biden’s cognitive fitness during an election year, scrutiny that Democrats and much of the mainstream press spent months attempting to dismiss or downplay. The actual audio recordings, however, promised to let the American people judge for themselves rather than relying on secondhand descriptions filtered through political spin.
That is precisely why Biden fought so hard to keep them sealed. After Hur’s report became public, the conservative Heritage Foundation and its former Oversight Project director, Mike Howell, pursued the recordings through public records requests, arguing that voters deserved to hear the actual audio that shaped Hur’s conclusions rather than take anyone’s word for what was on the tapes.
The Justice Department initially resisted releasing the material, but that changed in February of this year, when the department under the current administration reversed its position and said it intended to disclose redacted versions of the recordings and transcripts to both the Heritage Foundation and the House Judiciary Committee. Department lawyers argued in court filings that releasing the materials would allow the public to properly assess the persuasiveness of Hur’s determinations.
Biden responded by suing to block that release altogether. His case landed before U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, herself a Trump nominee, ruled against him in June, finding that the public interest in the material outweighed whatever privacy rights the former president could claim over conversations he voluntarily gave to a professional biographer for a commercial memoir.
Biden appealed that ruling to the D.C. Circuit, setting up the fight that concluded with this week’s decision. The panel, made up of Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judges Gregory Katsas and Florence Pan, initially issued a brief administrative injunction to preserve the status quo while it considered Biden’s request for a longer pause pending appeal.
That temporary block expired, and the panel ultimately ruled against Biden by a 2-1 margin.
Writing for the majority, the panel concluded that any remaining privacy intrusion from releasing the now redacted materials likely does not outweigh the substantial public interest in disclosure. In doing so, the court gave Biden until August 3 to weigh any further appeal, but the writing on the wall was unmistakable.
Judge Pan dissented sharply, arguing that the majority’s decision would effectively force the premature release of what she called Biden’s concededly private conversations.
She wrote that the ruling amounts to siding with immediate disclosure by denying Biden the injunction he sought, warning that such a result would likely moot the entire case before it could be fully litigated. Pan argued that Biden had shown a substantial privacy interest in the recordings that deserved more protection than the majority was willing to give it.
Despite Pan’s objections, the practical effect of the ruling was clear, and it appears Biden’s legal team recognized as much. Just days after the appellate defeat, reports indicated that Biden had dropped his effort altogether, abandoning the legal fight rather than continuing to pursue what by that point looked like a losing battle.
The reported total volume of material at stake runs to roughly 70 hours of audio recordings between Biden and his ghostwriter.
For Republicans who have spent more than a year demanding accountability and transparency around Biden’s mental fitness while in office, this represents a significant vindication.
House Judiciary Committee Republicans specifically fought to obtain this material, and their persistence, combined with the Heritage Foundation’s public records efforts, is what ultimately forced this issue into federal court in the first place.
It is worth remembering how unusual it is for a former president to personally sue his own Justice Department, now under a different administration, to prevent the release of records connected to a federal investigation into his own conduct. That alone speaks to how sensitive Biden and his allies considered these recordings to be.
