A federal judge rejected former President Joe Biden's bid to block the release of hours of recorded interviews with his ghostwriter, ruling that the public's interest in the material outweighs Biden's privacy claims, then, hours later, granted a three-week window for an appeals court to weigh in before the tapes go out.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich denied Biden's request for a preliminary injunction on June 19, clearing the Justice Department to hand over redacted audio and transcripts to the Heritage Foundation and the House Judiciary Committee. Biden's attorneys filed an emergency motion that same afternoon, and Friedrich paused her own ruling long enough for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals to decide whether to intervene.
The fight centers on recordings Biden made with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer, sessions that Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained during his investigation into Biden's improper retention of classified documents as a senator and vice president. Hur ultimately declined to charge Biden, but his report described the taped sessions in terms that raised sharp questions about Biden's fitness. A Biden spokesperson declined to comment on either the ruling or the stay.
Friedrich's memorandum opinion left little room for ambiguity. She found Biden unlikely to prevail on the merits. She ruled the Justice Department's decision to release the files was not an abuse of discretion. And she concluded that heavy redactions had already shrunk Biden's privacy stake to the point where the remaining material no longer touched on family, illness, or death.
As the Daily Caller reported, Friedrich wrote plainly in her opinion:
"Biden has not identified any public harm that would arise absent an injunction in this case."
AP News reported that Friedrich also stated 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." That finding directly undercut the core of Biden's privacy argument, that disclosure would expose intimate personal details.
Biden's legal team countered that the disclosure "cannot be undone," framing the release as irreversible harm. Friedrich evidently found that argument insufficient to justify blocking the files, but she did grant the brief pause so the D.C. Circuit could take a look.
The Heritage Foundation filed its FOIA request in March 2024, seeking records behind Hur's report on Biden's handling of classified documents. Under the Biden administration, the Justice Department fought to keep the files sealed, invoking FOIA exemptions. That refusal became a political flashpoint, Newsmax noted that Biden's own administration's stonewalling led to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland being held in contempt of Congress over the recordings.
The Trump administration reversed course. The current Justice Department authorized the release of the materials to the Heritage Foundation staffer who had formally requested them under federal records law. That reversal set the stage for Biden's lawsuit, a former president going to court to stop his own government's successor from complying with a transparency request.
Biden's legal team had previously moved to block the DOJ from releasing what they described as 70 hours of ghostwriter audio in a court filing last month. Friedrich's ruling this week was the direct result of that challenge failing on the merits.
The recordings matter because of what Special Counsel Hur said they revealed. Hur's report, as CBS News previously detailed, described Biden's taped sessions with Zwonitzer in blunt terms:
"Painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries."
That description became one of the most politically significant lines in Hur's entire investigation, not because it led to charges, but because it laid bare concerns about Biden's cognitive state during a period when he was still serving as president. Hur declined to prosecute, but the portrait he painted of Biden in those sessions carried its own weight.
The recordings themselves could confirm, complicate, or deepen that portrait. That is precisely why Biden fought so hard to keep them sealed, and why the Heritage Foundation and congressional investigators wanted them released.
Friedrich's ruling addressed only the FOIA side of the dispute, whether the Justice Department could hand the files to the Heritage Foundation. A separate Biden lawsuit, aimed at blocking the congressional handover of the same materials to the House Judiciary Committee, remains undecided before another judge. Breitbart reported that Biden's team had asked for a pause on the release pending appeal, which Friedrich granted in the narrow form of the three-week stay.
So the legal fight is not over. 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 takes up the case, the pause could extend further.
The pattern here is familiar. Biden-era decisions, from DOJ stonewalling on FOIA requests to programs now generating federal charges, keep landing in courtrooms where judges are forced to sort out what the previous administration refused to resolve transparently.
Friedrich's three-week pause is not a reversal. She denied the injunction on the merits. She found Biden's privacy arguments insufficient. She found no public harm from disclosure. The stay is a procedural courtesy, standard practice when a losing party signals an immediate appeal.
But the clock is now ticking. Biden's attorneys must convince the D.C. Circuit that Friedrich got it wrong, that the public interest in these recordings does not outweigh a former president's desire to keep them sealed, and that the redactions already applied are not enough to protect whatever privacy interest remains.
That is a steep climb. Friedrich's opinion addressed each of Biden's arguments and found them wanting. The materials contain no family references, no discussion of illness or death, no mention of non-public persons. What they do contain, by Hur's own description, is a former president struggling through sessions that were supposed to produce a memoir.
The public has a right to see what its government investigated and why a special counsel described a sitting president's mental performance the way Hur did. Biden's team argues the release "cannot be undone." That is true of every act of transparency. It is not, by itself, a reason to keep the public in the dark.
When a former president spends this much legal energy trying to bury tapes his own special counsel already described in writing, the question stops being whether the recordings are embarrassing. The question is what, exactly, the American public is still not being allowed to hear.