A federal appeals court has ruled against former President Joe Biden's effort to block the release of roughly 70 hours of audio recordings from his memoir ghostwriter interviews, tapes that could expose the same memory lapses Special Counsel Robert Hur documented in 2024.
A divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled 2-1 late Monday that the public interest in the recordings outweighs Biden's privacy claims. Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, an Obama appointee, joined Trump appointee Judge Gregory Katsas in the majority. Judge Florence Pan, whom Biden himself nominated, dissented.
The court found a "substantial" public interest in disclosing the material Biden has fought for months to suppress. The recordings capture interviews Biden gave to ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer at his home in 2016 and 2017 while working on his memoir, Promise Me, Dad. Special Counsel Hur obtained those tapes during his investigation into Biden's mishandling of classified documents from his years as a senator from Delaware and as vice president.
The panel suspended its decision until August 3, giving Biden time to weigh yet another appeal. But two federal courts have now reached the same conclusion: Biden's desire for privacy does not trump the public's right to hear what is on those tapes.
The appeals court upheld a June ruling by U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee, who found that Biden's "diminished privacy interest" was outweighed by the public's stake in the Zwonitzer materials and the broad disclosure policy embedded in federal public-records law. Friedrich granted a brief stay at the time to allow Biden's legal team to appeal.
Biden sued the Justice Department to prevent it from releasing the recordings to congressional Republicans and the Heritage Foundation, both of which had sought the material. His lawyers argued the conversations were candid and personal and were never intended for public consumption.
The D.C. Circuit was not persuaded. As Newsmax reported, the majority wrote:
"We conclude that any remaining incursion on personal privacy from disclosure of the now-redacted materials likely does not outweigh the public interest in disclosure."
The court noted that redactions already applied to the recordings would help protect Biden's remaining privacy interests. In other words, the government had already carved out sensitive material, and the rest still belongs in the public record.
The recordings matter because of what Hur found when he listened to them. His February 2024 report declined to prosecute Biden for willfully retaining classified information but described the former president in terms no sitting leader wants attached to his name: "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." Hur's team described Biden's conversations as "painfully slow," the New York Post reported.
Previously released transcripts showed Biden struggling during the Hur interview to recall the year his son Beau died. "Was it 2015 he had died?" Biden asked after being reminded. That moment contradicted Biden's own public characterization of how the interview went.
Biden's recent public struggles have only sharpened interest in the recordings. If the transcripts alone raised serious questions about his cognitive state during the Hur sessions, the audio, with its pauses, tone, and pacing, could answer them in a way printed words cannot.
Republicans in Congress demanded the tapes after Hur declined to charge Biden. Their argument was straightforward: if the special counsel decided the former president's mental state was a factor in the no-prosecution decision, the public deserves to hear the evidence that led to that judgment.
The Justice Department's handling of the recordings has its own credibility problems. DOJ lawyers initially denied that transcripts of the Biden-Zwonitzer conversations existed. They later located 117 pages of verbatim transcripts spread across six electronic files, National Review reported.
DOJ lawyer Cameron Silverberg acknowledged the discovery in court filings:
"In the past few days...the Department located six electronic files, consisting of a total of 117 pages, that appeared to be verbatim transcripts of a small subset of the Biden-Zwonitzer audio recordings created for the SCO by a court-reporting service."
That reversal, first denying the transcripts existed, then producing them, did nothing to help Biden's argument that the material should stay locked away. It raised the opposite question: what else was being withheld, and why?
Under Biden's own administration, the White House invoked executive privilege to block release of the Hur interview tapes and pressured Hur to soften his language about Biden's age and memory. The Trump Justice Department has taken the opposite approach, moving to comply with disclosure requests from Congress and the Heritage Foundation.
Biden spokesperson T.J. Ducklo pushed back on the ruling, framing the release as politically motivated. As AP News reported, Ducklo said:
"President Biden's conversations for a book a decade ago that discussed his late son are private, and were provided to the Department of Justice on the express condition they stay that way."
Ducklo called the release "political retribution." The argument leans heavily on sympathy, Biden discussed his late son Beau in the interviews, and his family is understandably distressed at the prospect of those conversations becoming public.
But sympathy does not override the law. Two federal courts have now found that the public interest in these recordings, recordings that bear directly on a special counsel's decision not to prosecute a sitting president, outweighs one man's desire to keep them sealed. Biden provided the material to the DOJ. The DOJ is a government agency. Government records are subject to disclosure.
Biden reportedly received a $10 million advance for his memoir, which is set for release November 17, two weeks after the midterm elections. The interviews that produced that book were not whispered confessions to a priest. They were business sessions for a multimillion-dollar publishing deal, conducted with a professional ghostwriter, and later swept into a federal investigation.
Mike Howell of the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project signaled his organization would keep pressing. "We are monitoring the situation and, as always, will do whatever is in the best interest of getting these tapes out to the American people as fast as possible," Howell told the Washington Examiner.
Biden now has until August 3 to decide whether to seek further review, potentially from the full D.C. Circuit sitting together, or from the Supreme Court. Given the 2-1 split and the presence of a Biden-appointed dissenter, his legal team may calculate there is enough daylight to try again.
But the trajectory is clear. A Trump-appointed district judge ruled against him. A bipartisan appellate panel, including an Obama appointee, ruled against him. The only judge who sided with Biden was the one he put on the bench.
The broader legal saga over these recordings has stretched across multiple courts and administrations. At every turn, Biden's team has argued that privacy should prevail. At every turn, the courts have said the public has a right to know.
When a former president fights this hard to keep the American people from hearing his own voice, the recordings have already told us something.
