Former President Joe Biden on Friday dropped his lawsuit attempting to bar the release of his memoir tapes to the public, after an appeals court ruled in favor of releasing them.
Biden’s attorneys filed the notice of voluntary dismissal, days after a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled against his bid to block the release of dozens of hours of audio recordings and interview transcripts he made while working on his 2017 memoir, Promise Me, Dad.
“We conclude that Biden has not shown a likelihood that the requested materials must be withheld from disclosure,” the judges wrote.
The recordings and transcripts have been the subject of legal battles for years; Biden has sought to block the Justice Department from releasing them to the public. The former president has argued they contain personal information that should be protected as private information.
“Every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home,” Biden’s lawyers wrote. “And when the U.S. Department of Justice obtains that private information through a criminal investigation, the Department bears a particular responsibility to protect it from disclosure.”
The Heritage Foundation sued for the records to be released to the public, due to findings from special counsel Robert Hur in 2024 that Biden spilled classified information in the audio and transcripts. Hur said that multiple times, “Mr. Biden read classified notes from national security meetings to Zwonitzer nearly verbatim,” as he wrote his memoir with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer.
Hur obtained the materials as part of his investigation into whether Biden leaked classified information. Zwonitzer told the FBI that in 2023, he erased several audio files from his interviews with Biden after learning of Hur’s investigation, because he was concerned about “being hacked” and having the audio of personal conversations “spread all over the place.”
Zwonitzer also told Hur’s team Biden told him that he found a classified document at his home.
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The special counsel ultimately declined to press charges from the DOJ against the former president, saying the elderly figure would likely successfully present himself at trial as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The remainder of the materials could be released as soon as this weekend from the DOJ, after the Heritage Foundation won its bid for them to be released.