A federal judge denied former President Joe Biden's bid to block the release of his recorded interviews with his ghostwriter, ruling that Biden failed to show any public harm from disclosure, then gave him three weeks to take his case to a higher court.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich issued her ruling on June 19, clearing the Justice Department to hand over redacted audio and transcripts to the Heritage Foundation and the House Judiciary Committee. Hours later, Biden's attorneys filed an emergency motion, and Friedrich granted a temporary stay so the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals could decide whether to intervene, the Daily Caller reported.
The recordings at issue capture Biden's sessions with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer, sessions that Special Counsel Robert Hur's team obtained during its investigation into Biden's improper retention of classified documents. Hur ultimately declined to charge Biden. But his report offered a description of those sessions that Biden has every reason to want kept from public earshot.
Hur described Biden's recorded exchanges with Zwonitzer in terms that drew national attention when his report first surfaced. As CBS News reported, Hur characterized the sessions as:
"Painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries."
That description alone made the tapes a subject of intense public interest, and an obvious political liability for Biden. The Heritage Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act request in March 2024 seeking the records behind Hur's report. Biden's own Justice Department, under Attorney General Merrick Garland, fought to keep the files sealed under FOIA exemptions.
Congressional Republicans did not let the matter rest. Breitbart reported that the Biden administration's refusal to release the recordings led to Garland being held in contempt by congressional Republicans, a rare and pointed rebuke of a sitting attorney general.
The Trump administration reversed the Biden-era DOJ's stance and authorized the release. Biden then sued last month to stop it, Newsmax reported.
Friedrich found Biden unlikely to win his case. She ruled the DOJ's decision to release the files was not an abuse of discretion. And she directly addressed Biden's privacy claims, writing that heavy redactions had already shrunk his privacy stake. The remaining material, she found, no longer touched on family, illness, or death.
In her memorandum opinion, Friedrich was blunt. She wrote:
"Biden has not identified any public harm that would arise absent an injunction in this case."
That is a significant finding. Biden's legal team was not merely arguing that release would embarrass a former president. They were asking a federal court to override the executive branch's own FOIA determination, a determination made by the sitting administration's Justice Department. Friedrich declined to do so.
The AP reported that Friedrich ruled the public interest in the recordings outweighed Biden's privacy rights, calling the decision a significant legal defeat for Biden's effort to keep the recordings private.
Friedrich also noted, as multiple outlets confirmed, that the materials "contain no mention of highly sensitive topics like illness or death, nor do they mention any non-public persons, including members of Biden's family." In other words, the redactions had already stripped out the kind of content that might give a court genuine pause. What remained was a former president's own words about his own public conduct, exactly the kind of material FOIA was designed to surface.
Biden's attorneys moved fast after the ruling dropped. They filed an emergency motion the same afternoon, arguing that the disclosure "cannot be undone." Friedrich evidently found enough procedural merit in that argument, or at least enough routine appellate courtesy, to grant a three-week pause.
The stay does not reverse her decision. It simply holds the release in place while the D.C. Circuit decides whether to take up the matter. A Biden spokesperson declined to comment on either the ruling or the stay.
This is not Biden's only legal front. A separate Biden lawsuit aimed at blocking the congressional handover of the same materials remains undecided before another judge, ABC News reported. Biden is fighting on two tracks, one against the Heritage Foundation's FOIA request, another against Congress, and has now lost the first round on the FOIA side.
The broader arc here is worth examining. Biden's own DOJ under Garland refused to release the recordings. Congressional Republicans held Garland in contempt over that refusal. The Trump administration reversed course and authorized disclosure. Biden then sued to block the release his own successor's DOJ approved. And now a federal judge has told him he is unlikely to win.
At every stage, the instinct was the same: suppress. The Biden team's argument rested not on national security, not on the privacy of third parties, not on any recognized FOIA exemption that Friedrich found persuasive, but on the simple proposition that a former president should be able to keep embarrassing recordings out of public view.
Friedrich's ruling says the law does not work that way. The public interest in understanding how a president handled classified documents, and how he performed during the investigation into that handling, outweighs a former president's preference for silence.
This is hardly the first time Biden-era officials have clashed with federal courts over transparency and compliance. A separate investigation found that the Biden Education Department invented a loophole to enforce gender identity rules in defiance of a federal court order, a pattern of institutional resistance to judicial authority that extended across multiple agencies.
The D.C. Circuit now has three weeks to decide whether to step in. If it declines, the redacted audio and transcripts go to the Heritage Foundation and the House Judiciary Committee. If it grants a longer stay or takes up the appeal, the recordings remain locked away while the legal process grinds forward.
The content of those recordings is already partly known through Hur's report. The special counsel's description of Biden's performance, struggling to remember events, straining to read his own notes, became a defining moment in the public debate over Biden's fitness during his presidency. The audio would let the public hear for itself what Hur described in writing.
That prospect is precisely what Biden's legal team is trying to prevent. Their argument that disclosure "cannot be undone" is technically true of any FOIA release. It is not, as Friedrich's ruling makes clear, a legal basis for blocking one.
The Biden family's legal and public struggles continue on other fronts as well. Hunter Biden's recent return to public life has drawn its own share of attention, though the former president's ghostwriter tapes carry far more direct implications for the historical record.
Meanwhile, the judicial landscape around Biden-related matters remains active. An Obama-appointed judge with deep Biden ties recently issued a notable ruling in a separate case, a reminder that the federal bench remains a contested arena where political connections and legal outcomes intersect.
Biden was not charged. Hur made that decision, and it stands. But the special counsel's report made clear that Biden's mental acuity during those ghostwriter sessions was a factor in the prosecutorial calculus, Hur suggested a jury might find Biden sympathetic precisely because of his evident decline. The tapes could confirm or complicate that assessment.
The public has a right to weigh that evidence. The Heritage Foundation's FOIA request was filed more than two years ago. The Biden administration stonewalled it. The Trump administration approved it. A federal judge has now affirmed it. And Biden's legal team is burning through every procedural option to keep the recordings sealed.
If the tapes contain nothing damaging, the fight to suppress them is inexplicable. If they do, the public deserves to know what its government tried to hide, and why.
