Appeals court lets Heritage Foundation seek Biden ghostwriter tapes

A federal appeals court rejected Joe Biden’s bid to keep the Justice Department from turning over redacted audio recordings and transcripts of his talks with memoir ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer to the Heritage Foundation. The material was created before Biden became president and later ended up in the hands of special counsel Robert Hur during the classified-documents investigation.

The fight centers on whether Biden, while out of office, can block disclosure of private conversations that became part of a criminal inquiry. Biden argued that releasing the recordings would violate his privacy rights. U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia disagreed on June 19, 2026, finding that the public interest outweighed Biden’s privacy interests.

Friedrich said the Justice Department could release the redacted versions to the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has pressed for access to the files. She also imposed a temporary stay of about three weeks to give Biden time to appeal, a pause that briefly kept the material from being released while the case moved to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Hur’s special counsel report, released in February 2024, concluded that no criminal charges would be filed over Biden’s handling of classified documents. But the report also said Biden read aloud classified notebook passages to Zwonitzer on at least three occasions while recounting meetings, a detail that intensified the push for public access to the recordings and transcripts.

The dispute has become a test of how far executive privacy extends once a president’s personal conversations are swept into a federal investigation. It also raises a broader issue that could echo in future fights over presidential records, special counsel materials and requests driven by partisan or ideological groups seeking politically sensitive disclosures through the courts.