A divided federal appeals court has refused to keep sealed the audio recordings and transcripts of former President Joe Biden’s interviews with the ghostwriter who helped produce his memoirs, dealing him a loss in a fight over material collected in a criminal investigation that ended without charges. The 2-1 decision came late on July 20, 2026, from a panel of three judges at the D.C. Circuit, the federal appellate court that sits in Washington, and was reported the next day.
Release was not immediate, however. The panel suspended its own decision until August 3, leaving Biden room to weigh another appeal. In the majority’s view, the public’s stake in hearing the material is substantial, and redactions already applied to the recordings would shield much of what is personal in them.
A Divided Panel in Washington
The unsigned majority opinion came from Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Gregory Katsas. “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 who is investigated but never charged ordinarily holds a strong privacy interest in not being publicly identified as a target, the two judges acknowledged. Here, they wrote, the Justice Department had already announced the special counsel’s appointment and the purpose of his inquiry, and the resulting report laid out at length that Biden had been examined over the alleged retention and disclosure of classified material. Because the recordings would help the public understand and evaluate how the special counsel reached his conclusion, the majority found, releasing them 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. Katsas got his seat from President Donald Trump, who was defeated by Biden in 2020 before retaking 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 what the majority’s order would do in practice. Denying an injunction while the appeal proceeds, she argued, effectively decided the question in favor of immediate disclosure and set up the premature release of conversations that everyone agrees were private — an outcome, she wrote, that would render the case moot.
How the Tapes Reached the Government
Mark Zwonitzer, the writer who worked with Biden on the 2007 memoir “Promises to Keep” and the 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad,” interviewed him at his residence during 2016 and 2017, in the years before Biden won the presidency. According to Biden’s attorneys, he spoke candidly about personal subjects during those sittings and believed the recordings would remain strictly between the two of them.
Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained the recordings while examining how Biden handled classified documents dating from his tenure as a Delaware senator and from his vice presidency, which concluded in 2017. Hur filed no charges. His 2024 report leaned on the ghostwriter sessions, describing them as sluggish and casting Biden as unable to pin down when events occurred and, at points, struggling with entries he had written in his own notebooks.
Not long after the report became public, the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, submitted a public records request for the underlying material Hur had used. Congressional Republicans pushed for it too. Biden went to court seeking an injunction that would bar Trump’s Justice Department from handing the recordings to the think tank and to members of Congress. The department had previously argued that the recordings were not subject to public records law.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, appointed by Trump, ruled in June that the public interest outweighed whatever privacy interest Biden still held in the material. He took the case up on appeal. The D.C. Circuit panel then granted a short administrative injunction on July 10 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 — made for a book roughly 10 years ago and covering ground that included the former president’s late son — were provided to the Justice Department only on the express understanding that they would stay private. Backing out of that assurance, Ducklo said, means the administration is using the department as a tool of political revenge. Biden disagrees with the ruling but respects the courts and the part an independent judiciary plays in a healthy democracy, he also said.
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.
Biden plans to release a new memoir, “Promise Me, America,” after the November midterm elections.