A federal judge has denied Joe Biden's bid to block the public release of roughly 70 hours of audio recordings he made with his ghostwriter, recordings that a special counsel found captured the former president reading classified information aloud inside his own home.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich sided with the Heritage Foundation, ruling that the public's interest in the material outweighs whatever privacy claim Biden retains over conversations that federal investigators already obtained, reviewed, and redacted.
The decision hands Biden a significant legal defeat in a fight he launched earlier this year after the Trump administration moved to reverse a Biden-era hold on the tapes. It also sets the stage for an appellate battle: Biden's lawyers immediately filed for an injunction pending appeal, and Judge Friedrich granted a minimum three-week window before any recordings can be turned over.
The audio at issue dates to Biden's work on his 2017 memoir, Promise Me Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship and Purpose, ghostwritten by Mark Zwonitzer. The two men sat for extensive recorded sessions, and those tapes eventually drew the attention of federal investigators.
Special Counsel Robert Hur was appointed in 2023 to probe concerns that Biden had mishandled classified material. Hur's team began combing through the recordings and, in a February 2024 final report, concluded that Biden "willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency, including reading classified information aloud to Zwonitzer and revealing sensitive military and foreign policy in Afghanistan."
Despite that finding, Hur recommended against prosecution. He explained that a jury would struggle to convict because Biden "would likely present himself at trial as 'a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.'" The description of the then-81-year-old president set off a political firestorm at the time and raised pointed questions about Biden's fitness for office, questions that members of the Biden family have largely declined to address.
The DOJ accepted Hur's recommendation, stating it did not believe the evidence met the standard for criminal charges.
In April 2024, the Heritage Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the audio conversations. The filing came after the DOJ declined to press charges, and Heritage argued that the public had a strong interest in understanding exactly why Hur chose not to prosecute despite finding willful retention and disclosure of classified material.
Under the Biden administration, the DOJ placed a hold on the tapes. But after President Trump took office, the administration in February signaled its intent to reverse that hold and allow release of partially redacted versions to both the Heritage Foundation and the House Judiciary Committee, as the Washington Examiner reported.
Biden responded by suing the DOJ, arguing he holds "a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home." That lawsuit sought to keep the recordings sealed permanently.
Judge Friedrich was unpersuaded. In her ruling, she noted that the DOJ had already redacted all information about Biden's family and other private persons from the recordings before any potential release. The remaining material, she found, bore directly on a matter of intense public interest: the government's decision not to charge a sitting president who was found to have shared classified secrets with an unauthorized individual.
Friedrich wrote in her decision:
"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 in order to ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society.'"
She also found, as Breitbart reported, that Biden failed to prove the DOJ abused its discretion in deciding to release the redacted material. In a separate passage of the ruling, Friedrich stated that "the Department did not abuse its discretion in finding that nothing in the remaining Zwonitzer materials is sensitive enough to outweigh the public's unusually strong interest."
That phrase, "unusually strong interest", carries weight. The judge was not simply applying a routine FOIA balancing test. She recognized that the circumstances here are extraordinary: a former president caught on tape disclosing classified information, investigated by a special counsel, and then spared prosecution under reasoning that itself became a national controversy.
Zwonitzer's own conduct added a layer to the case. Newsmax reported that the ghostwriter attempted to delete the recordings, but investigators recovered them. Zwonitzer was subsequently granted immunity in exchange for his cooperation with Hur's probe.
That detail matters. A ghostwriter tried to destroy evidence of a former president reading classified material aloud. Investigators had to recover what he tried to erase. And the public was told, for more than a year, that the tapes should stay sealed because of privacy concerns, even though the classified information had already been shared with someone who lacked any security clearance to hear it.
Biden spokesperson TJ Ducklo called the planned disclosure "political rather than transparency-driven." Mike Howell, president of Heritage's Oversight Project, countered that the audio would bear on disputes about Biden's fitness for office and his handling of classified material.
Biden's legal team built its case on the idea that a former president retains a privacy interest in conversations held inside his own home. On its face, that is a reasonable principle. Most Americans would agree that what you say in your living room should stay private.
But that principle collapses when the conversations involve reading classified government secrets to an unauthorized person, when a special counsel obtains the recordings as evidence, and when the government has already stripped out every personal and family reference before release. What remains is not a private chat between friends. It is a record of how a public official handled, or mishandled, the nation's most sensitive information.
Judge Friedrich's ruling acknowledged as much. The recordings, she noted, "contain no information about Biden's family or other private persons." Biden's privacy argument, in other words, was not really about privacy. It was about keeping the public from hearing what Hur heard.
Biden's public appearances in recent months have done little to quiet the questions Hur's report raised. He was recently seen standing alone on stage at the Obama Presidential Center opening, calling out for his granddaughter, a moment that reinforced concerns about the former president's condition.
Biden's lawyers have filed for an injunction pending appeal, and Judge Friedrich granted a brief window before any release can proceed. The appellate fight could delay public access to the recordings for weeks or months.
But the legal trajectory is clear. Biden lost on every substantive point at the district court level. The judge found no abuse of discretion by the DOJ, found the privacy interest diminished, and found the public interest strong enough to override it. An appeals court would need to find that Friedrich got the law wrong, not merely that Biden would prefer the tapes stay sealed.
Meanwhile, Biden has continued to promote his memoir publicly, a fact that sits awkwardly beside his argument that the conversations used to create it should be locked away from the American people.
The Heritage Foundation's FOIA request asked a simple question: if the special counsel found that Biden willfully shared classified information, why shouldn't the public hear the evidence? The DOJ under Trump agreed the public should. A federal judge now agrees, too.
Several open questions remain. The specific classified details Biden allegedly disclosed, beyond references to Afghanistan military and foreign policy, have not been fully described. Whether the appellate court will grant an emergency stay is uncertain. And the broader question of whether the Biden family's aggressive public posture can survive the release of 70 hours of unscripted audio remains to be seen.
A former president who shared classified secrets with his ghostwriter now wants those recordings sealed in the name of privacy. A federal judge said no. The public's right to know what its leaders did with its secrets is not a partisan talking point, it is the baseline of self-government.
