Former President Joe Biden's legal team abandoned its months-long effort to block the release of audio recordings from the Special Counsel Robert Hur classified documents probe, a retreat that clears the way for roughly 70 hours of potentially damaging material to reach Congress and the public.
Biden's attorneys filed a motion to voluntarily dismiss their lawsuit against the Justice Department, and Obama-appointed Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia accepted the dismissal Monday. The move ends a legal battle that stretched across multiple courts and drew a contempt-of-Congress vote against Biden's own attorney general. Biden's lawyers offered a simple reason for backing down: the former president is now a private citizen and is not seeking public office.
That explanation may satisfy a courtroom filing, but it does nothing for the millions of Americans who spent the better part of two years watching the Biden White House, the Justice Department, and Biden's personal attorneys fight to keep these recordings sealed. The tapes capture Biden's 2016 and 2017 conversations with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer, recorded while Biden worked on his memoir Promise Me, Dad. The DOJ obtained those recordings during Hur's investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents from his years as a U.S. senator from Delaware and as vice president.
Special Counsel Robert Hur investigated Biden's retention of classified material and ultimately declined to pursue criminal charges, concluding prosecutors could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Biden willfully retained or disclosed the documents. But Hur's reasoning was itself a bombshell. He wrote that Biden could appear to a jury as a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" rather than an intentional violator of classified document laws. Hur's report described some of Biden's exchanges with Zwonitzer as "painfully slow."
Audio released separately from Biden's direct interview with Hur's team bore that characterization out. National Review reported that the audio captured Biden mistakenly saying his son Beau died in 2017, he died in 2015, and that Biden told investigators Trump was first elected in 2017, when Trump won in 2016.
Biden himself, during that interview, described the personal origins of his memoir:
"OK, yeah. In 2017, Beau had passed and, this is personal, the genesis of the book and the title Promise Me, Dad, was a, I know you're all close with your sons and daughters, but Beau was like my right arm and Hunt was my left."
He had the year wrong. His own son's death, the event at the center of his book, and he could not place it correctly.
The ghostwriter recordings now heading toward release are a separate body of material: roughly 70 hours of audio from Biden's sessions with Zwonitzer. The Washington Examiner reported the recordings were central to the Heritage Foundation's Freedom of Information Act battle and could shed further light on Hur's decision not to prosecute.
The Oversight Project, led by Mike Howell, fought for more than two years to pry these materials loose through FOIA requests. The Biden administration resisted at every stage. When the DOJ reversed its earlier position in February and announced it intended to disclose redacted versions of the recordings and transcripts to the Oversight Project plaintiffs and the House Judiciary Committee, Biden's personal attorneys moved to block the release in a separate court filing.
That effort failed. U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich denied Biden's request for a preliminary injunction, ruling that "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." Breitbart reported that the court found the DOJ acted within its discretion in deciding the public's right to know outweighed Biden's privacy claims.
Biden's attorneys then filed an emergency request with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to block release of the tapes. A divided three-judge panel ruled against Biden there too. D.C. Circuit Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, writing for the majority, stated:
"We conclude that any remaining incursion on personal privacy from disclosure of the now-redacted materials likely does not outweigh the public interest in disclosure."
After that ruling, Biden's attorneys filed their Friday motion to drop the case entirely. Judge Chutkan accepted the voluntary dismissal Monday. Fox News Digital reported that Biden's attorneys did not respond to a request for comment.
Jeff Clark, Vice President for Litigation at the Oversight Project, did not hold back about what the recordings may reveal. He told Fox News Digital:
"We are looking forward to reviewing these tapes that Joe Biden and his administration were allowed to hide for too long. They should show his mental decline as far back as 2016/2017. Yet his Party ran him as President."
Clark's statement frames the stakes beyond a FOIA dispute. If the ghostwriter recordings confirm what Hur's report described, a man struggling to recall basic facts and dates during the same period Democrats were positioning him for the presidency, the political implications extend well past Biden himself.
The Biden administration previously invoked executive privilege to keep the Hur interview tapes from Congress, a decision that led House Republicans to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress in June 2024. That contempt vote now looks less like partisan overreach and more like a justified response to an administration actively concealing evidence of its leader's fitness.
Concerns about Biden's cognitive state were not confined to Republican critics. The Washington Free Beacon documented how CNN anchor Jake Tapper repeatedly defended Biden's mental fitness on air from 2019 through 2024, only to later publish a book, Original Sin, revealing that Democrats were alarmed by Biden's condition as early as August 2020. One unnamed Democrat quoted in Tapper's book described watching Biden during Democratic National Committee video shoots: "It was incredible. This was like watching Grandpa who shouldn't be driving."
Tapper himself said of Biden in September 2023: "Right. He's sharp physically. I mean mentally." The gap between what the press told the public and what insiders knew privately is a story that keeps growing, and the tapes now set for release could widen it further.
With the lawsuit dismissed, the Justice Department faces no remaining legal obstacle to releasing the redacted recordings and transcripts to the House Judiciary Committee and the FOIA plaintiffs. The DOJ had already signaled its intent to do so in February. What remains unclear is the precise timeline for that handoff and the scope of redactions that will be applied.
The House Judiciary Committee has not publicly commented on the dismissal or the anticipated release, at least not in available reporting. But the committee now stands to receive material that a former president, his personal legal team, and, for a time, his own Justice Department worked to suppress. The recordings cover a period when Biden was a private citizen preparing a memoir, not a sitting president conducting official business. The privacy argument was always thin. Two federal courts agreed.
Democrats are already dealing with a difficult political landscape. From concealed personal histories surfacing in Arizona House races to intraparty accusations of corruption in Michigan Senate debates, the party is contending with transparency problems on multiple fronts. The release of Biden's ghostwriter tapes adds another layer of exposure at a moment when the party can least afford it.
Howell, the plaintiff who spent more than two years pursuing the recordings, argued throughout the litigation that the public has a legitimate interest in reviewing the material on which Hur based his decision not to prosecute. That argument prevailed at every level of the federal judiciary that heard it.
Biden's legal team chose to fight this battle for as long as the courts would let them. When every judge said no, they folded. The question now is what 70 hours of tape will tell the country about the man who held the nuclear codes, and about the people who insisted he was fit to do so.