Former President Joe Biden has lost his fight to keep secret the audio recordings and transcripts of the interviews he sat for with the ghostwriter who helped produce his memoirs. A divided three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit, the federal appellate court that sits in Washington, ruled 2-1 against him late on July 20, 2026, in a decision reported the next day — a defeat in a legal battle over material collected during a criminal investigation that ended without charges.
Release was not immediate, however. The panel put its own decision on hold until August 3 so Biden could consider a further appeal. In the majority’s view, the public has a substantial stake in hearing the material, and redactions already made to the recordings would keep much of what is personal out of view.
A Divided Panel in Washington
The majority came from Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Gregory Katsas, writing in an unsigned opinion. “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,” the ruling says.
Ordinarily, the two judges acknowledged, a person who is investigated but never charged holds a strong privacy interest in avoiding public identification as a target. Here, they wrote, the Justice Department had already made public the special counsel’s appointment and the purpose of his inquiry, and his report described at length how Biden had been examined over the alleged retention and disclosure of classified material. Since the tapes would help the public understand and evaluate how the special counsel arrived at his conclusion, the majority found, disclosure is likely to serve that interest.
The two members of the majority were named to the bench by opposing sides. The seat held by Srinivasan came from then-President Barack Obama — the Democrat whose running mate and vice president was Biden. Katsas, for his part, was seated by President Donald Trump, the man Biden beat in 2020 and who won the White House back in 2024.
Pan Dissents on Privacy Grounds
The dissent came from Judge Florence Pan, a Biden nominee. “In my view, Biden has shown a substantial privacy interest,” Pan wrote. She pointed out that the conversations took place inside Biden’s home and that the government obtained the recordings by way of a criminal investigation that produced no indictment.
She also warned about what the majority’s order would do in practice. Refusing an injunction while the appeal is pending, she argued, amounted to deciding in favor of immediate disclosure and paved the way for the premature release of conversations that all sides agree were private. The result, she wrote, would be to render the case moot.
How the Tapes Reached the Government
The sessions were conducted at Biden’s residence during 2016 and 2017, in the years before he won the presidency, by Mark Zwonitzer, the writer who worked with him on the 2007 memoir “Promises to Keep” and the 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad.” According to Biden’s attorneys, he spoke candidly about personal subjects in those interviews and believed the recordings would remain strictly between the two men.
They reached the government through Special Counsel Robert Hur, whose inquiry looked at Biden’s handling of classified documents dating from his years as a senator from Delaware and from the vice presidency he left in 2017. No charges were filed by Hur. The ghostwriter sessions supplied much of the raw material for his 2024 report, which called them sluggish and portrayed Biden as unable to pin down when events occurred and, in places, struggling with entries he had written in his own notebooks.
A public records request for the underlying material Hur had used followed soon after the report became public, filed by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. Congressional Republicans pushed for it too. Biden turned to the courts for an injunction that would stop Trump’s Justice Department from handing the recordings to the think tank and to members of Congress. Public records law did not cover the recordings, the department had argued earlier.
Whatever privacy interest Biden retained in the material was outweighed by the public interest, U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee, ruled in June, and he took the case up on appeal. A short administrative injunction from the D.C. Circuit panel followed on July 10, freezing any release for 10 days and set to lapse at 11:59 p.m. on July 20; the judges cautioned that the pause was purely procedural — time to examine the emergency motion, and no indication of how the case would come out.
Biden’s Team Alleges Political Payback
Biden spokesperson T.J. Ducklo said an express understanding that they would stay private was the sole basis on which the Justice Department received the recordings, which were made for a book roughly 10 years ago and touched on subject matter that included the former president’s late son. Walking away from that assurance, in Ducklo’s telling, amounts to the administration wielding the department as a tool of political revenge. Biden, he added, disagrees with the ruling but respects the courts and the part an independent judiciary plays in a healthy democracy.
The Supreme Court never heard the fight; Biden dropped the suit instead. The Oversight Project, an arm of the Heritage Foundation, then put the material out on July 27 — roughly three hours of audio along with 117 pages of heavily redacted transcripts.
Classified material from his vice presidency, among it a handwritten memorandum on Afghanistan policy, is described by Biden on a 2017 session, in which he also struggles at points to fix dates and details. The release was politically motivated, Ducklo said, and he repeated that the conversations had gone to the Justice Department on the express condition that they stay private. A new memoir from Biden, “Promise Me, America,” is planned for after the November midterm elections.
