Former President Joe Biden dropped his lawsuit to keep dozens of hours of memoir interview recordings from going public, days after a federal appeals court ruled he failed to justify withholding them.
Biden's attorneys filed a notice of voluntary dismissal on Friday, ending the legal fight over audio recordings and transcripts from his sessions with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer. The move came after a divided three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sided against Biden's bid to block the release, the Washington Examiner reported.
The recordings, roughly 70 hours of audio from Biden's 2016, 2017 interviews for his memoir Promise Me, Dad, sit at the center of a years-long controversy over the former president's handling of classified material. Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained the tapes during his investigation into whether Biden leaked classified information. Hur found that Biden had done exactly that, but declined to press charges.
Now, with Biden's lawsuit dead, the Department of Justice could release the remaining materials as soon as this weekend. The Heritage Foundation, which sued for the records, won its case. And the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan, stands to receive the material as well.
The appeals court's majority opinion left Biden little room to maneuver. Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Gregory Katsas, ruling 2-1, wrote that the public has a "weighty" interest in scrutinizing Hur's decision not to charge Biden. Newsmax reported the panel found that any remaining privacy concerns did not outweigh the public's right to see the evidence.
The court's majority put it plainly:
"We conclude that Biden has not shown a likelihood that the requested materials must be withheld from disclosure."
Biden's legal team had argued the recordings captured private conversations inside his own home, conversations the government obtained through a criminal probe and bore a special duty to protect. His lawyers wrote in their filing:
"Every American, including a sitting or former Vice President, has a right to privacy in the personal conversations he has within his own home."
They added that when the DOJ obtains private information through a criminal investigation, "the Department bears a particular responsibility to protect it from disclosure." The court disagreed. Biden had lost at every level of the judiciary in his effort to keep these recordings sealed.
A Biden spokesperson, TJ Ducklo, said Biden "disagrees" with the ruling but "respects the courts and the vital role an independent judiciary plays in a healthy democracy." Rather than pursue further appeals, Biden walked away from the case. The appellate stay lifts August 3.
The recordings matter because of what Hur's 2024 investigation revealed was on them. Hur found that Biden shared classified information with Zwonitzer during their memoir sessions, material the ghostwriter had no clearance to hear.
Hur wrote that Biden "read classified notes from national security meetings to Zwonitzer nearly verbatim" on multiple occasions. Biden also told Zwonitzer he had found a classified document at his home. These were not passing references or vague allusions. They were, according to the special counsel's own findings, direct readings of sensitive national security material to a private citizen working on a book deal.
Despite those findings, Hur declined to bring charges. His reasoning drew widespread attention: Hur concluded Biden would likely present himself at trial as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." That characterization became a political flashpoint in 2024, raising questions about Biden's fitness that his own party spent months trying to contain. Biden had been fighting to suppress the special counsel audio long before the appeals court forced his hand.
The ghostwriter's own conduct adds another layer. Zwonitzer told the FBI that in 2023, after learning of Hur's investigation, he erased several audio files from his interviews with Biden. His stated reason: he was concerned about "being hacked" and having the audio of personal conversations "spread all over the place."
Whether those erased files were ever recovered remains unclear. But the fact that a key witness destroyed evidence after learning of a federal probe, and offered a fear-of-hacking explanation for doing so, raises obvious questions about what those recordings contained and why Zwonitzer felt compelled to delete them.
Zwonitzer also told Hur's team that Biden informed him about finding a classified document at his home. That admission, combined with Hur's finding that Biden read classified notes aloud during their sessions, paints a picture of a former vice president who treated classified material with striking carelessness, and then fought to keep the evidence of that carelessness from public view.
The broader pattern of Biden-era controversies resurfacing makes this latest development harder for Democrats to dismiss as old news. The tapes are about to speak for themselves.
The Heritage Foundation deserves credit for pressing the case. The conservative organization sued for the records' release, arguing the public had a right to examine the evidence underlying Hur's decision. The D.C. Circuit agreed.
Biden's legal strategy amounted to a privacy argument: that these were personal conversations recorded in his home, and the government had no business making them public. But the court weighed that claim against the public interest in understanding why a special counsel found evidence of classified leaks and still walked away without charges. Privacy lost.
Biden's attorneys abandoned the legal fight rather than take the case further. The voluntary dismissal means no Supreme Court appeal, no further injunctions, no more delay. The DOJ can now release the remaining material, and the House Judiciary Committee and Heritage Foundation will receive what they sought.
The lower court had already rejected Biden's arguments before the D.C. Circuit affirmed. At every stage, judges found that Biden's privacy claims could not override the public's interest in accountability.
Much remains unknown. The public has not yet heard the full recordings. How much of the roughly 70 hours contains classified disclosures, how much is routine memoir material, and how much Zwonitzer deleted permanently, none of that is settled. But Hur's report already told the country the core facts: Biden read classified notes aloud to an unauthorized person, multiple times, and no one was charged for it.
The tapes will let Americans hear the evidence for themselves. That prospect clearly troubled Biden enough to wage a legal campaign across multiple courts to prevent it. He lost at the district level. He lost at the appellate level. And on Friday, he quit.
When a former president spends years trying to hide recordings of himself sharing classified information, and then gives up only after every court tells him no, the public is right to wonder what exactly is on those tapes. Soon enough, they can stop wondering and start listening.