Former President Joe Biden has lost his bid to keep under wraps the audio recordings and transcripts of the interviews he gave the ghostwriter who helped him write his memoirs. Sitting in Washington, three judges of the D.C. Circuit — the federal appellate court there — split 2-1 and refused to keep the material sealed, in a decision handed down late on July 20, 2026, and reported the next day. The ruling is a defeat for Biden in a legal fight over material gathered during a criminal investigation that ended without charges.
Nothing was released immediately. The panel put its own order on hold until August 3, leaving Biden room to weigh another appeal — a window he let pass, dropping the suit before the recordings were made public on July 27. The public’s stake in hearing the material is substantial, the majority reasoned, and much of what is personal in the recordings was shielded by redactions that had already been applied to them.
A Divided Panel in Washington
Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Gregory Katsas wrote the unsigned majority 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.
Someone investigated but never charged normally holds a strong privacy interest in not being publicly identified as a target, the two judges acknowledged. But the special counsel’s appointment and the purpose of his inquiry had already been announced by the Justice Department, they wrote, and the alleged retention and disclosure of classified material was set out at length in the resulting report as the subject on which Biden had been examined. Their release is likely to serve the public interest, the majority found, because the recordings would help people understand and evaluate the route the special counsel took to his conclusion.
Srinivasan owes his seat to then-President Barack Obama, the Democrat who chose Biden as his running mate and vice president. Katsas was named by President Donald Trump; it was Biden who defeated him in 2020, before Trump retook the White House in 2024.
Pan Dissents on Privacy Grounds
Judge Florence Pan, a Biden nominee, dissented. “In my view, Biden has shown a substantial privacy interest,” Pan wrote. She noted that the conversations happened inside Biden’s home and that the government came into possession of the recordings through a criminal investigation that produced no indictment.
Pan also warned about the practical effect of the majority’s order. Denying an injunction while the appeal proceeds, she argued, effectively decides the case in favor of immediate disclosure and sets up the premature release of conversations that everyone agrees were private. Such an outcome, she wrote, would render the case moot.
How the Tapes Reached the Government
Mark Zwonitzer wrote both memoirs with Biden — 2007’s “Promises to Keep” and 2017’s “Promise Me, Dad” — and sat down with him at his residence during 2016 and 2017, in the years before Biden won the presidency. Biden’s attorneys say he spoke candidly about personal subjects during those sittings, in the belief that the recordings would remain strictly between the two of them.
The tapes reached the government while Special Counsel Robert Hur was investigating. His examination covered classified documents dating from Biden’s tenure as a Delaware senator and from a vice presidency that concluded in 2017, and he filed no charges. The ghostwriter sessions featured in his 2024 report, which said Biden had read classified material to Zwonitzer nearly verbatim from his notebooks on at least three occasions, telling him some of it might be classified. The report’s much-quoted findings about Biden’s memory concerned his interview with Hur himself, not the sessions with the writer; the recordings released this summer show him struggling with dates and details in those conversations too.
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, filed a public records request for the underlying material days after the report was released, and congressional Republicans pushed for it too. Biden sought an injunction in court, one that would bar Trump’s Justice Department from handing the recordings to the think tank and to members of Congress. The department had argued earlier that the recordings were not subject to public records law.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Trump appointee, ruled on June 19 that the public interest outweighed whatever privacy interest Biden still held in the material. Biden took the case up on appeal. On July 10, the D.C. Circuit panel granted a short administrative injunction that halted any release for 10 days, due to lapse at 11:59 p.m. on July 20, while warning that the freeze 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 the recordings were made for a book roughly a decade ago, covered ground that included the former president’s late son, and went to the Justice Department only on the express condition that they stay private. Reversing course, he said, is “the latest example of this administration weaponizing the Department of Justice for political retribution.” Biden disagrees with the ruling, he also said, but respects the courts and the part an independent judiciary plays in a healthy democracy.
Rather than carry the fight to the Supreme Court, Biden dropped the suit, and on July 27 the Oversight Project, an arm of the Heritage Foundation, put the material out — roughly three hours of audio and 117 pages of heavily redacted transcripts. In a 2017 session, Biden can be heard describing classified material from his vice presidency, among it a handwritten memorandum on Afghanistan policy, and struggling at points to fix dates and details. Ducklo called the release politically motivated, repeating that the conversations had gone to the Justice Department on the express condition that they stay private.
A new Biden memoir, “Promise Me, America,” is scheduled for November 17, two weeks after the midterm elections.
