A federal judge has rejected Joe Biden’s demands to keep concealed the tapes and transcripts of interviews he had with a ghostwriter many years ago, items that have been sought by a conservative advocacy organization and others.
Bloomberg reported Judge Dabney Freidrich has concluded that the information can be made public, on a request from the Heritage Foundation, but she delayed the order for three weeks to give Biden a chance to appeal, which his lawyers immediately confirmed.
“Friedrich wrote that Biden failed to prove at this stage that the Justice Department’s decision to release the materials was an abuse of officials’ discretion in weighing his privacy against the public’s interest in the contents. Certain portions would be redacted, the judge said, such as information about Biden’s family and health issues,” the report said.
Biden made the comments on the recordings in 2016 and 2017 when he was working on a memoir.
The recordings have been sought both by the foundation and Republicans in Congress following a report that was released in 2024 citing them as documentation of Biden’s “diminished” mental capacity.
The evidence of that has been publicly seen for years. He’s lost his way trying to find a pathway off a stage, he’s misidentified his own family members, he’s called for a member of Congress who had died, he’s confirmed conversations with world leaders who had died, and a special counsel famously concluded it wasn’t worth charging him for mishandling government secrets because jurors would see him, essentially, as a bumbling, senior citizen.
🚨 BREAKING: Federal Judge SLAMS the door on Biden’s desperate attempt to bury his secret recordings with his ghostwriter.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich just ruled that the public interest in these tapes outweighs Biden’s privacy claims.
The Trump administration can now… pic.twitter.com/ej3ygeNeez
— GRANDPA’s FREE ADVICE (@GOP_is_Gutless) June 20, 2026
Federal judge gives DOJ green light to turn Biden’s audio files over to the Heritage Foundation https://t.co/H6SKFcZneB
— POLITICO (@politico) June 19, 2026
🚨 A federal judge rejected former President Biden’s bid to block the Justice Department from releasing redacted audio recordings and transcripts from Special Counsel Robert Hur’s investigation. pic.twitter.com/Qr404Smlhu
— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) June 19, 2026
His staff members actually wrote instructions for him when he was going into an event on where to sit, what to say, who to address and even when to get up and leave.
A report by CBS said the delay of transcripts and recordings of Biden talking with writer Mark Zwonitzwer will be for three weeks.
The judge said Biden’s privacy interests are mitigated by “extensive redactions” by the Department of Justice
The judge explained, “Biden has not identified any public harm that would arise absent an injunction in this case. And, as with the Department’s FOIA balancing discussed above, 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.'”
Biden’s lawyers were ready with their protest, claiming, “This Court should grant an injunction pending appeal to prevent an irreversible change in the status quo. President Biden’s motion for a preliminary injunction raises serious legal questions, and the disclosure of his private conversations cannot be undone. The resulting damage to his privacy and to weighty law enforcement interests will be permanent.”
Robert Hurt, a special counsel who investigated Biden for mishandling government documents – he kept them in various offices, even an unsecured garage – used some of the transcripts to write portions of his government report.
Hur’s report, in fact, noted Biden’s “diminished faculties and faulty memory” as shown in Zwonitzer’s recordings.
He pointed out Biden had to struggle to remember events and strained to relay even his own notebook entries.
The judge found, “This case presents a confluence of significant public disclosures of prosecutorial decision-making, explicit reliance on particular records, and the statements of a high-profile public figure to support the Department’s decision.”
