Newly released audio from Joe Biden's memoir interviews has him warning his ghostwriter that notes he was reading from were classified, undercutting two years of legal effort by his own attorneys to keep the recordings sealed.
Joe Biden spent two years and a federal lawsuit trying to keep a set of tapes out of the public eye. On Monday his lawyers gave up. They filed a notice of voluntary dismissal, ending Biden's court fight to block the release of roughly 70 hours of recordings between the former president and his memoir ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, clearing the way for the House Judiciary Committee and news organizations including CBS News to obtain the audio and transcripts.
The retreat came less than a week after a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2 to 1 against Biden, finding what the court called a substantial public interest in disclosure. Once that ruling landed, Biden's team had little left to argue. They folded rather than press an appeal they were likely to lose anyway.
The recordings, made in 2016 and 2017 as Biden worked with Zwonitzer on his memoir "Promise Me, Dad," were never meant for public consumption. They were raw material, the kind of unscripted conversation an author has with a collaborator long before a single sentence gets polished for print. That informality is exactly what makes the newly surfaced clips notable. In one exchange described by people who have reviewed the tapes, Biden can be heard pausing mid-anecdote to tell Zwonitzer that material he was about to read from was classified, then proceeding anyway, asking his ghostwriter to be careful with how it was handled.
The moment matters far beyond its curiosity value. It lands squarely inside a debate that has dogged Biden since the closing months of his presidency, when special counsel Robert Hur's 2024 report concluded that classified documents from his time as vice president had turned up in his Delaware garage and in a Virginia office he used after leaving the Obama administration. Hur declined to bring charges, citing Biden's age and memory in a characterization the White House called gratuitous and unfair. Biden's allies have spent the better part of two years arguing that any classified material in his possession was the product of sloppy staff work, not deliberate mishandling. Audio of Biden himself flagging classified content in real time, then continuing to discuss it with a writer who had no security clearance, complicates that defense considerably.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, who subpoenaed the tapes as part of a broader inquiry into Biden's mental fitness and handling of sensitive material, has argued for more than a year that the recordings could show what Hur's investigators heard but declined to release publicly. The Justice Department under the Biden administration had resisted turning over the audio, offering only a transcript, a distinction Republicans said mattered because tone and hesitation can reveal as much as words on a page. Monday's dismissal removes the last procedural barrier to Jordan's committee obtaining the full recordings rather than a written summary.
Attorneys for Biden did not offer a detailed explanation for abandoning the case beyond the appellate court's ruling, and a spokesperson for the former president did not respond to requests for comment on what specifically prompted the decision to stand down rather than seek further review, including a possible petition to the full D.C. Circuit or the Supreme Court. Legal analysts who have followed the case said an en banc rehearing or a Supreme Court appeal was always a long shot given how narrowly the panel framed its reasoning around public interest in presidential recordkeeping.
What happens next will play out on two tracks. CBS News and other outlets that sued alongside conservative legal groups for access are expected to begin publishing excerpts and analysis of the audio in the coming days. Separately, the House Judiciary Committee is expected to fold the recordings into its ongoing report on Biden's handling of classified information, a document Jordan has signaled will be released before the end of the year. Whether the tapes ultimately reshape the public record on Biden's culpability or simply add texture to a story largely already told through Hur's findings remains to be seen, but for the first time, the public will get to judge the moment for itself rather than rely on someone else's characterization of it.
Also read: Trump administration cuts asylum interviews to speed cases to court • Jeffries wont rule out an abolish ICE vote if Democrats retake the House • DSA co-chair says true to abolishing the Senate, ICE and borders
