Joe Biden is fighting to keep roughly 70 hours of audio recordings from his 2017 interviews with a book ghostwriter out of the public's hands, even as the Trump Justice Department prepares to release them and Congress has formally requested the material.
A court filing from Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, reported by Fox News Digital, laid out the standoff in plain terms. Biden, through his lawyers, told the DOJ he intends to intervene in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project to prevent the release of redacted transcripts and audio from the recordings. The Department said it does not oppose his intervention, but also made clear it intends to release the materials to both Congress and the FOIA plaintiffs.
The recordings stem from Biden's sessions with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer for the 2017 memoir "Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose." Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained the audio during his investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents, an investigation that ended without charges but produced a description of Biden that became politically radioactive: "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."
Biden's legal team faces a Tuesday deadline to formally object. If they do, the release of the recordings could be pushed back to June 15, 2026. That timeline has drawn sharp criticism from the plaintiffs in the FOIA case, who say Biden's lawyers have dragged their feet for months.
The filing language is unusually blunt for a government court document. Shumate wrote that Biden "has changed position and now seeks to even enjoin release of the portions of transcripts that match exact phrases quoted in the Hur Report", meaning Biden wants to suppress material that a special counsel already quoted in a public report.
The plaintiffs' frustration is documented in the filing as well:
"President Biden's lead counsel was unable to provide any information about President Biden's submissions arguing that such discussion was somehow premature (whereas, in reality it is 16 months late) and incredibly indicating that despite the June 15, 2026 production date, the motion to intervene would not be filed until mid-next week and that President Biden would seek up to three days after a ruling granting a motion to intervene to submit a proposed schedule for substantive relief."
The filing called the approach something that "smacks of kicking the can down the road to justify delaying the June 15, 2026 production by some form of administrative injunction."
This is not a new posture for Biden's orbit. During his presidency, the White House released a written transcript of Biden's October 2023 interview with Hur but refused to release the accompanying audio. Biden asserted executive privilege over the recordings, and when the House Judiciary and Oversight committees demanded them, the standoff escalated into contempt proceedings against Attorney General Merrick Garland. Both committees voted along party lines to advance the charges after Garland refused to hand over the audio.
At the time, White House counsel Ed Siskel accused Republicans of wanting the recordings for political purposes, writing: "The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal, to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes."
The Biden team's resistance to releasing the audio takes on a different cast when you consider what the recordings apparently contain. Axios, as reported by Newsmax, described the audio as capturing long pauses, difficulty recalling key dates and events, and moments where Biden's attorneys supplied answers or helped fill gaps in his memory.
Axios reported: "The audio shows what the transcript lacks, the president's dry-whisper voice and the long silences as he struggles to find the right words or dates. Those often were supplied by his attorneys, who acted as caretakers of his memory."
A transcript can smooth over hesitation, mumbling, and silence. Audio cannot. That distinction matters, and it helps explain why the Biden team has treated the recordings as a separate category of threat from the written record, even though both cover the same conversations.
The former president's post-White House activities have continued apace, including political endorsements, but the legal fight over these recordings has followed him into private life with no sign of resolution.
TJ Ducklo, Biden's spokesman, told Politico on Sunday that Biden cooperated fully with Hur and provided the audiotapes of conversations with his biographer "for a book about his deceased son on the condition that they would not be made public."
Ducklo added: "The DOJ themselves have said these tapes serve no public interest."
Then came the pivot. Ducklo said: "What's happening now isn't about transparency. It's about politics." He followed that with a demand that if the Trump administration were "genuinely committed to transparency," it would release Volume 2 of Special Counsel Jack Smith's report on Trump's "own alleged mishandling of classified documents."
The whataboutism is notable. Biden's team is not arguing the recordings are inaccurate or that the redacted versions would expose national security secrets. The argument is that releasing them is political, a claim that applies to virtually every contested document release in Washington's recent history.
The Justice Department under Acting AG Blanche has faced its own transparency questions on other fronts, but the DOJ's position in this case is straightforward: it plans to release the material, with redactions, to Congress and to the Heritage Foundation as part of the FOIA litigation.
Mike Howell, president of Heritage's Oversight Project and the FOIA requester at the center of the case, has not been subtle about what he expects the recordings to show.
"These tapes will further prove the massive lie regarding Biden's fitness for office and the fact Biden revealed classified information."
Howell also told Politico that "the shenanigans aren't over," describing Biden's last-minute objection as coming "after every delay tactic possible." He characterized the move as the "autopen objecting to the American People receiving transparency."
The Washington Examiner reported that the recordings gained renewed scrutiny after Hur described Biden's memory as "fuzzy," "hazy," and "poor" during the classified-documents investigation. That language, combined with the audio's reported content, has made the tapes a focal point for those who argued Biden's cognitive decline was concealed from the public during his presidency.
Hur's investigation examined Biden's storage of classified documents at the Penn Biden Center and at his private garage. The special counsel noted the longstanding DOJ policy against indicting a sitting president and said a jury would likely be sympathetic to Biden because of his age, 82, and presentation as a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." The decision not to charge Biden was itself controversial, leaving open the question of whether the same conduct by a younger, sharper official would have drawn a different conclusion.
The broader pattern of Biden-era legal maneuvering around sensitive investigations has drawn sustained conservative scrutiny, and this latest filing fits squarely within that pattern.
The DOJ filing from Shumate made the stakes clear: Biden would need a court order barring release in the FOIA case and a separate order enjoining the DOJ from producing the materials to the House Judiciary Committee, all by June 15, 2026.
Shumate's filing concluded with a pointed statement: "The public deserves to hear the tapes and read the transcripts as redacted by President Donald J. Trump's Department of Justice."
The plaintiffs, meanwhile, said they cannot even assist the court in moving forward because Biden's lawyers have repeatedly failed to engage, "putting off even initial substantive conversations until next week."
The House Judiciary Committee sent its request for the materials in a March 23, 2026 letter. The DOJ described its planned release to Congress as "discretionary", a response to the committee's request, not a court order. That framing gives Biden's lawyers a narrow procedural lane to challenge the congressional disclosure, but it also highlights the political reality: the Trump DOJ wants these recordings out, Congress wants them, and the FOIA plaintiffs have been waiting for years.
The Justice Department's recent willingness to act aggressively in politically charged cases suggests the recordings' release is a matter of when, not whether.
Biden's team says the tapes were provided on a promise of confidentiality. But the material was obtained as part of a federal investigation into the mishandling of classified documents, not a casual book interview. The recordings were evidence. They were gathered by a special counsel with subpoena power. The idea that a subject of a federal probe gets to dictate which evidence the public eventually sees is a remarkable claim, regardless of party.
The written transcript is already public. Portions of it were quoted in Hur's final report. Biden's lawyers now want to block even the release of audio that matches those already-public quotes. The filing says so explicitly.
When a former president spends months delaying, negotiating, and then filing at the last possible moment to suppress recordings of his own words, the public is entitled to wonder what those words sound like.