Former President Joe Biden lost his effort to keep sealed the audio recordings and transcripts of the interviews he gave the ghostwriter who helped produce his memoirs, and the material has been public since July 27, 2026. The fight ended after a federal appeals court declined late on July 20 to block disclosure, in a dispute over material collected in the course of a criminal investigation that closed without any charges being brought. Three judges on the D.C. Circuit — the federal appellate court seated in Washington — split 2-1 in the decision, which was reported the next day.
Release did not follow right away. The panel suspended its own decision until August 3, leaving Biden room to weigh another appeal. Much of what is personal in the recordings would be shielded by redactions already applied to them, the majority found, while the public’s stake in hearing the material is substantial.
A Divided Panel in Washington
An unsigned opinion by Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Gregory Katsas carried the day. “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 investigated but never charged holds a strong privacy interest in not being publicly identified as a target. In this instance, though, the special counsel’s appointment and the aim of his inquiry had already been made public by the Justice Department, the judges wrote, and the report that followed spelled out at considerable length that the alleged retention and disclosure of classified material by Biden was what had been under examination. The tapes, in the majority’s view, would let the public grasp and weigh the reasoning behind the special counsel’s conclusion, so their release is likely to serve that interest.
Then-President Barack Obama — the Democrat who chose Biden as his running mate and vice president — placed Srinivasan on the court. The seat held by Katsas came from President Donald Trump, whom Biden beat in 2020 and who returned to the White House 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 noted that the conversations took place inside Biden’s home and that the government obtained the recordings through a criminal investigation that produced no indictment.
The practical effect of the majority’s order drew a warning from Pan as well. Denying an injunction while the appeal is still pending, she argued, was effectively a decision for immediate disclosure, one that teed up the early release of exchanges no one disputes were private — leaving nothing left to litigate, she wrote, and rendering the case moot.
How the Tapes Reached the Government
The 2007 memoir “Promises to Keep” and the 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad” were written with Mark Zwonitzer, and the writer met Biden at his home across 2016 and 2017, before Biden won the presidency. According to Biden’s attorneys, he spoke candidly about personal subjects in those sessions and believed the recordings would remain strictly between the two of them.
The recordings reached the government through Special Counsel Robert Hur, who examined Biden’s handling of classified documents dating from his years as a Delaware senator and from a vice presidency that ended in 2017. Hur filed no charges. The ghostwriter sessions featured heavily in his 2024 report, which called the recorded conversations “painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.”
Soon after that report became public, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, filed a public records request for the underlying material Hur had used, and congressional Republicans pushed for it as well. Biden turned to the courts for an injunction to stop Trump’s Justice Department from handing the recordings to members of Congress and to the think tank. The department had earlier taken the position that the recordings were not subject to public records law.
Whatever privacy interest Biden still held in the material was outweighed by the public interest, U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, appointed by Trump, ruled on June 19. Biden appealed. On July 10 the D.C. Circuit panel granted a short administrative injunction halting any release for 10 days, set to lapse at 11:59 p.m. on July 20 — a pause the judges described as purely procedural, giving them time to review the emergency motion and signaling nothing about the eventual outcome.
Biden’s Team Alleges Political Payback
“President Biden’s conversations for a book a decade ago that discussed his late son are private, and were provided to the Department of Justice on the express condition they stay that way,” Biden spokesperson T.J. Ducklo said in a statement. “Reversing course and making them public is just the latest example of this Administration weaponizing the DOJ for political retribution. It’s wrong, and while President Biden disagrees with today’s decision, he also respects the courts and the vital role an independent judiciary plays in a healthy democracy.”
No appeal to the Supreme Court followed. Biden dropped the suit instead, and the material was published on July 27 by the Oversight Project, an arm of the Heritage Foundation, as audio and heavily redacted transcripts. “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs,” Biden says in a session recorded on February 16, 2017, in which he also refers to a 40-page memorandum he wrote urging President Barack Obama against sending more troops to Afghanistan. “Some of this may be classified, so be careful,” he says in an April 24 session. “I’m not sure. It’s not marked classified.” He struggles at points to pin down dates and details. Jeff Clark, the Oversight Project’s vice president of litigation, said the recordings show Biden “clearly gives away secret after secret to someone not authorized to hold such secrets.”
A new memoir from Biden, “Promise Me, America,” is due November 17 from Little, Brown and Company, after the midterm elections.