DOJ may be able to release potentially embarrassing Biden audio recordings unless courts step in

By Katelyn Polantz, CNN

(CNN) — Former President Joe Biden is in an uphill battle to try to stop the Justice Department from sharing recordings it collected of him speaking to his ghostwriter in 2016 and 2017, during which his speech and memory faltered.

Court decisions on Friday and into next month are poised to revive questions over Biden’s mental acuity during his presidency — and even in the years before.

The Justice Department is set to provide about two hours of recordings of Biden speaking to writer Mark Zwonitzer to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee in the next three weeks, unless a court steps in to block the move, which would be unusual.

Before the House committee’s request for the tapes is resolved, the conservative Heritage Foundation already won a judge’s initial endorsement last week for the public release of the tapes.

The foundation hasn’t yet received the recordings or transcripts of them, however, because Biden is appealing. A federal trial-level judge has already paused the release of the tapes for three weeks, to allow the appellate court in DC time to weigh in.

DC District Judge Dabney Friedrich — siding with the Heritage Foundation on Friday after listening to the tapes for herself — wrote that the Justice Department was within its abilities to decide to release the tapes now. She also said the Justice Department plans to redact parts of the tapes, and she decided “that Biden’s privacy arguments largely overlook the Department’s recent redactions and reasonings.”

Friedrich agreed that Biden’s interest in keeping the tapes private was somewhat diminished by the publication of his resulting memoir, “Promise Me, Dad,” among other reasons.

“After the latest round of redactions, the Zwonitzer materials contain no mention of highly sensitive topics like illness or death, nor do they mention any non-public persons, including members of Biden’s family,” Friedrich wrote Friday. “The remaining materials largely contain Biden’s discussion of foreign policy — including his references to what may have been classified material in his possession — and his decision not to run for President in 2016.”

Heritage has sought the tapes for years, believing that Biden is captured in the recordings being forgetful and losing his train of thought well before he became president.

Conservatives have also sought to review the findings of special counsel Robert Hur, who investigated Biden speaking to the ghostwriter about foreign affairs and examined whether Biden illegally disclosed classified details in the conversations. Hur noted in his final report that Biden conversed with Zwonitzer in a way that was “painfully slow” and revealed the former vice president struggled to remember things or even read his own notes.

“Whether President Biden did, in fact, leak classified information, whether President Biden was in fact impaired, and whether senior Members of the Biden-Harris Administration covered up Biden’s apparent cognitive decline is and will continue to be a salient issues in the upcoming 2026 Election,” lawyers for the Heritage Foundation wrote to Friedrich on Friday afternoon as they push to get the tapes quickly.

The Justice Department during Biden’s presidency resisted turning the tapes over to groups that requested them, but the agency has changed course in recent weeks under Trump.

A separate court case in which Biden is fighting to prevent the tapes from being handed over to Republican lawmakers could be resolved soon as well. Biden’s lawyers have repeatedly argued that he deserves privacy for parts of conversations that Hur didn’t previously make public, and that the Justice Department’s transparency is motivated by the Trump administration’s animosity toward Biden.

Rep. Jim Jordan, who now chairs the House Judiciary Committee, has been attempting to gain evidence collected from Biden’s ghostwriter for years.

Most recently, the Justice Department agreed it would wait another three weeks to provide Jordan the recordings as the court fights continue.

Federal judges have rarely intervened when the Justice Department, in the executive branch, agrees to provide information or evidence in its possession to Congress.

Separate audio recordings of Biden being interviewed by Hur in 2023 have already been released publicly. More heavily redacted versions of the Biden-Zwonitzer transcripts from 2017 have also previously been made public.

It was in Biden’s interviews with prosecutors that he forgot the years of his vice-presidential term and the year of his son Beau’s death.

Hur ultimately declined to charge any crime, concluding that a jury likely would see the then-president “as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and struggle with determining whether Biden had the presence of mind in 2017 to willfully and improperly share classified details.

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