A federal judge on Friday denied former President Joe Biden’s attempt to block the release of dozens of hours of audio recordings he made while working on his memoir.
The audio tapes were obtained by the Justice Department during its investigation into concerns that Biden mishandled classified materials. The Heritage Foundation initially filed a Freedom of Information Act request in April 2024 to obtain the conversations after the DOJ declined to press charges against the former president. When the Trump administration in February indicated its intent to reverse a Biden-era DOJ hold on the tapes, Biden retaliated with a lawsuit, arguing he holds “a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home.”
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich this week sided with the Heritage Foundation, dealing a blow to Biden’s efforts to block the audio from being released to the public. Friedrich noted that the recorded conversations were significantly redacted and “contain no information about Biden’s family or other private persons.” Her ruling gives the DOJ the green light to release the recordings, though Biden’s lawyers immediately launched an injunction pending appeal.
“The harm to Biden’s diminished privacy interest is outweighed by the public’s interest in the Zwonitzer materials and FOIA’s ‘policy of broad disclosure of Government documents in order to ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society,’” Friedrich wrote.
The conversations, around 70 hours of audio recordings, relate to Biden’s 2017 memoir Promise Me Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship and Purpose, which was ghostwritten by Mark Zwonitzer. Biden was accused of spilling classified information to Zwonitzer in ghostwritten tapes while they worked on the book.
Over at the DOJ, special counsel Robert Hur began combing through the tapes in 2023 after he was appointed to investigate concerns that Biden spilled classified information in those recordings. Interest in the audio further peaked because other recordings of Biden were leaked, confirming that he struggled with his memory while he was president.
The Heritage Foundation argued that there was significant public interest in releasing all the tapes to provide transparency as to why Hur declined to file criminal charges against Biden in the classified documents case.
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In his final February 2024 report, Hur found that Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency, including reading classified information aloud to Zwonitzer and revealing sensitive military and foreign policy in Afghanistan. However, the DOJ declined to press charges, explaining it did not believe the evidence met the standard for criminal charges.
Hur explained he believed there was a high probability that the Justice Department would not be able to prove Biden’s intent beyond a reasonable doubt, saying the 81-year-old would likely present himself at trial as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”