Former President Joe Biden dropped his lawsuit to block the release of roughly 70 hours of audio recordings from his memoir interviews with a ghostwriter, ending a legal battle that two federal courts ruled he should lose.
Biden's attorneys filed a notice of voluntary dismissal on July 25 in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., USA TODAY reported. The move came less than a week after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled 2-1 against Biden's request to keep the recordings and transcripts private. Biden chose not to seek Supreme Court review.
The recordings capture interviews Biden gave to ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer in 2016 and 2017 at his home for two memoirs, "Promise Me, Dad" and the earlier "Promises to Keep," published in 2007. Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained the recordings during his investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents. Hur found that Biden read classified national security notes "nearly verbatim" to Zwonitzer during those sessions.
Hur declined to bring criminal charges against Biden in 2024, but his report described Biden's memory as diminished, a finding that became politically devastating in its own right. Republicans in Congress demanded the raw interview material after Hur wrapped up his probe, and the Heritage Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act request and then sued to pry the recordings loose.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich ruled in June 2026 that Biden's privacy interests, while legitimate, were outweighed by the public interest in government transparency. Friedrich found that Justice Department redactions already in place adequately protected sensitive personal information. Biden appealed, temporarily blocking the release.
That appeal failed. Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Gregory Katsas wrote for the majority:
"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 court found a "substantial" and "significant" public interest in letting Americans scrutinize why Hur chose not to charge Biden over classified material, a decision that remains one of the most consequential and contested prosecutorial calls in recent memory. That reasoning cut directly against Biden's argument that the recordings captured nothing more than private conversations in his own home.
Judge Florence Pan dissented, writing that Biden had demonstrated a "substantial privacy interest" because the conversations occurred in his home and were obtained during a criminal investigation that never resulted in an indictment. Biden's own lawyers had argued that "every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy" in personal conversations at home.
The majority was unpersuaded. And Biden, rather than press the matter to the Supreme Court, walked away.
Biden spokesman TJ Ducklo said the former president "disagrees" with the ruling but "respects the courts and the vital role an independent judiciary plays in a healthy democracy," Newsmax reported.
That statement did not address the substance of what the recordings contain, or why Biden fought so hard to suppress material from interviews he voluntarily gave to a ghostwriter for a book he published under his own name. The recordings now head to the Republican-led House Judiciary Committee and the Heritage Foundation under the court's order.
The case also surfaced an uncomfortable detail about the ghostwriter himself. Zwonitzer told the FBI he deleted several audio files in 2023 after learning of Hur's investigation, citing concerns about being hacked. That admission raised its own set of questions about what else may have been on those recordings, and whether the full picture will ever be recoverable.
The dismissal is the latest chapter in a long series of legal and political headaches trailing the Biden family. As the Biden family has resurfaced in public life, so have the controversies Democrats spent years trying to minimize.
The scope of the material heading to congressional investigators is substantial. Newsmax put the total at roughly 70 hours of recordings and accompanying transcripts, a trove that covers two years of wide-ranging conversations between Biden and a collaborator who had deep access to the former president's thinking on national security, personal grief, and political strategy.
Hur's report already quoted selectively from the interviews. But raw audio carries weight that cherry-picked excerpts do not. Tone, hesitation, the pace of recall, all of it will now be available to lawmakers and, through the Heritage Foundation's FOIA victory, potentially to the public.
Biden's legal team never disputed that the recordings existed or that Hur had lawfully obtained them. Their argument rested entirely on privacy, the idea that a former president's candid remarks to a ghostwriter, made in his own home, should remain shielded even after a special counsel investigation brought them into the government's possession. Two courts disagreed.
The D.C. Circuit's earlier ruling against Biden's bid to block the recordings had already signaled that this fight was over. That appellate decision left Biden with narrow options, and the voluntary dismissal confirmed he had none worth pursuing.
Hur's investigation itself ended without charges, but the special counsel's description of Biden reading classified notes "nearly verbatim" to a ghostwriter remains one of the most damaging findings to emerge from the probe. The decision not to prosecute rested in part on Hur's assessment of how a jury would perceive Biden, not on a conclusion that no wrongdoing occurred. That distinction matters, and the recordings may shed further light on it.
Questions also remain about the full content of what Zwonitzer deleted before the FBI could secure it. The ghostwriter's explanation, fear of being hacked, did not satisfy critics who noted the timing: the deletions came after Zwonitzer learned a special counsel was looking into the very material he was erasing. Breitbart noted that the appeals court found a "substantial" public interest in disclosure, a standard that implicitly recognized the gravity of what was at stake.
Biden's handling of classified documents was hardly the only scandal that dogged his administration. Federal investigators have also documented staggering failures on his watch at the southern border, including a DOJ finding that more than 475,000 children were trafficked into the U.S. during his presidency, with hundreds of thousands still unaccounted for.
And the broader question of Biden's fitness during his final years in office, raised by Hur's report and confirmed in devastating fashion during his 2024 debate performance, continues to generate conflict even within his own circle. His wife, Jill Biden, has faced accusations from her own former spokesman of rewriting the history of that collapse.
Now 70 hours of unfiltered audio will let Americans hear Biden in his own voice, in his own home, talking about the matters that defined his political career. He fought to keep those tapes sealed. Two federal courts said no. And on July 25, Biden stopped fighting.
When a former president spends months in court trying to hide recordings of conversations he chose to have for a book he chose to publish, the public is right to wonder what he was so eager to keep quiet.