U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich ruled June 19 that roughly 70 hours of audio recordings capturing Joe Biden's conversations with his memoir ghostwriter must be released to the Heritage Foundation, rejecting the former president's bid to suppress them.
Joe Biden spent the final stretch of his presidency insisting he was sharp, capable, and wrongly maligned by a special counsel who described him as an elderly man with a poor memory. Now a federal judge has cleared the way for the public to hear the recordings that informed that finding, and Biden can only wait to see if an appeals court saves him.
Friedrich's 26-page decision, issued Thursday, denied Biden's request for a preliminary injunction blocking the Justice Department from handing the audio to the Heritage Foundation under a Freedom of Information Act request. The tapes, roughly 70 hours in total, captured Biden's conversations with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer in 2016 and 2017 during the writing of his memoir "Promise Me, Dad." Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained them in 2023 while investigating Biden's mishandling of classified documents after his vice presidency.
The judge's language was direct. "The harm to Biden's diminished privacy interest is outweighed by the public's interest in the Zwonitzer materials," Friedrich wrote, adding that DOJ's redactions had removed references to Biden's family members and other private individuals, leaving intact what the public has a legitimate right to hear.
Hur's 345-page report, released in February 2024, described those recorded conversations as "painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries." The report also alleged that Biden disclosed classified information from his notebooks to Zwonitzer during the sessions. Hur ultimately recommended no criminal charges, characterizing Biden as a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" , language that Biden publicly called "outrageous" and his aides furiously disputed.
The recordings are the raw material beneath that judgment. Biden's team fought hard to keep them sealed, first under his own administration, then in court after the Trump Justice Department reversed course earlier this year and authorized their release to Congress and the Heritage Foundation. Biden, now a private citizen, sued DOJ in May to stop the disclosure, arguing the tapes included sensitive personal discussions, among them conversations about the death of his son Beau. Friedrich found those concerns addressed by the government's redactions.
Biden's legal argument rested on privacy claims and on the contention that releasing the audio would chill future cooperation between witnesses and federal investigators. Friedrich rejected the latter, writing that the public interest in understanding the basis for Hur's charging decision cut the other way. The special counsel chose not to indict a sitting president over classified documents, and the recordings were central to that call. The public, Friedrich concluded, has a right to see that evidence.
Three Weeks to Appeal
The judge granted Biden a three-week stay, giving his legal team a window to seek emergency relief from the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. That appeal, if filed, would be the last real obstacle between Biden and the release of audio his lawyers have fought to suppress for more than two years.
The case fits a pattern that played out in slow motion during Biden's final year in office: the White House and its allies insisted reports of cognitive decline were politically motivated, while the evidence accumulated in court filings, transcripts, and now 70 hours of tape that a federal judge says the public has earned the right to hear. Biden's former press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre called Hur's memory findings "inaccurate" and "politically motivated" at the time. The recordings themselves will settle that dispute more conclusively than any press briefing ever could.
The D.C. Circuit will decide within weeks whether to intervene. If it does not, the Heritage Foundation gets the tapes, and the American public gets a direct answer to the question that hung over the 2024 election and Biden's final months in power.
Also read: Federal appeals court bars California from hiding student gender transitions from parents • Los Angeles City Council votes to put noncitizen voting on the November ballot • Celebrated as a trailblazer in 2012, Stacie Laughton gets 33 years for child exploitation
