Former President Joe Biden abandoned his legal fight to keep roughly 70 hours of audio recordings from memoir interviews out of public hands, a retreat that came days after a federal appeals court ruled the public's interest outweighed his privacy claims.
Biden's lawyers filed a notice of voluntary dismissal in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on Friday, ending a lawsuit he launched in May to prevent the Justice Department from releasing audio recordings and transcripts of interviews he gave to ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer in 2016 and 2017. The Hill reported the move came after a panel of D.C. Circuit judges rejected Biden's petition to block the material's release in a 2-1 ruling earlier in the week.
Biden chose not to petition the Supreme Court or request a rehearing before the full circuit court, effectively conceding the legal battle. The recordings and transcripts now stand to be released to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee and The Heritage Foundation, which had sued for the records.
The recordings capture conversations between Biden and Zwonitzer conducted at Biden's home as the two worked on a memoir ahead of Biden's 2020 presidential campaign. Those interviews became central to Special Counsel Robert Hur's investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents. Hur's 2024 report found that Biden read classified national security notes "nearly verbatim" to his ghostwriter, the Washington Examiner reported.
Hur ultimately declined to prosecute Biden, but his reasoning drew national attention. The special counsel described Biden as a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory", a characterization that raised sharp questions about Biden's fitness for office and fed months of public debate over his cognitive state.
Biden's legal team argued the release of the recordings would "constitute an unwarranted invasion of President Biden's privacy." Their original complaint went further:
"Every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home. And when the U.S. Department of Justice obtains that private information through a criminal investigation, the Department bears a particular responsibility to protect it from disclosure."
That argument failed to persuade the majority of the appeals court panel.
Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Gregory Katsas, writing for the majority, found that the public had a "substantial", and in the words of the ruling, "weighty", interest in scrutinizing Hur's decision not to charge Biden. Their opinion was direct:
"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."
AP News noted that Biden dropped the suit less than a week after that divided ruling, opting against any further appeal. The DOJ could release the materials as soon as the weekend following the ruling, according to reporting from the Washington Examiner.
Judge Florence Pan, the sole dissenter and a Biden appointee, sided with the former president. Pan wrote that Biden had demonstrated a "substantial privacy interest," pointing to the personal nature of the conversations and the circumstances under which the government obtained them:
"In my view, Biden has shown a substantial privacy interest. The conversations at issue took place in Biden's home, and the recordings of them were obtained by the government in the course of a criminal investigation that did not lead to an indictment."
Pan's dissent underscored that the investigation produced no charges. But the majority, which notably included two judges nominated by Democratic presidents, was unmoved. The public's right to evaluate how and why a special counsel chose not to prosecute a sitting president carried more weight than Biden's desire for privacy.
Biden spokesperson TJ Ducklo said Biden "disagrees" with the ruling but "respects the courts and the vital role an independent judiciary plays in a healthy democracy," Newsmax reported. That statement arrived only after Biden's legal team had tried and failed at every available level short of the Supreme Court.
The timeline tells its own story. Biden sat for the ghostwriter interviews in 2016 and 2017. Hur's investigation uncovered the recordings and found Biden had shared classified material with Zwonitzer. Hur declined to prosecute but issued a report that painted a damaging portrait of Biden's memory and judgment. Biden then sued the DOJ in May to block the release of the very recordings that formed the backbone of Hur's findings. A federal judge previously rejected Biden's effort to keep the conversations sealed, and the appeals court upheld that result this week.
At each step, Biden's team framed the fight as a matter of personal privacy. At each step, the courts said the public's interest was greater.
The broader context makes the privacy argument harder to sustain. Biden's cognitive decline became a central issue in the 2024 presidential race, particularly after his disastrous debate performance, an episode so alarming that Jill Biden later admitted she feared he was suffering a stroke on stage. Hur's description of Biden as an "elderly man with a poor memory" landed in that same fault line. The recordings Biden tried to suppress are the raw material behind that assessment.
The Heritage Foundation, which Breitbart reported had successfully sued for the records, and the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee are the two entities positioned to receive the roughly 70 hours of audio and accompanying transcripts. The material could shed further light on what Biden told his ghostwriter about classified national security matters, and how clearly or coherently he communicated during those sessions.
Biden's decision not to seek Supreme Court review effectively closes the legal chapter. There is no remaining procedural barrier between the recordings and their release.
The fallout from Biden's presidency continues to unfold even in his post-White House life. His own party has struggled to reckon with the decisions that defined his final years in office. Former Obama adviser Rahm Emanuel publicly condemned the Democratic National Committee and the Bidens in the aftermath, accusing the party of looking "worse than feckless."
Now the public will hear, in Biden's own voice, what he said behind closed doors to a ghostwriter, conversations he fought for months to keep sealed. The courts decided those words belong to the American people, not to the man who spoke them.
When a former president spends months in court trying to hide recordings of his own conversations about classified material, and loses at every turn, the public has a right to ask what exactly is on those tapes. Soon enough, they will find out.
