Judge clears release of Biden biographer tapes in FOIA dispute

A federal judge cleared the way for the Justice Department to release Joe Biden’s recorded conversations with biographer Mark Zwonitzer, putting private interviews from Biden’s home at the center of a sharp FOIA fight. U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich ruled Friday that the audio recordings and transcripts can be disclosed to the Heritage Foundation at 5 p.m., concluding that Biden’s privacy interests had been reduced by the Justice Department’s “extensive redactions.”

The lawsuit began when the Heritage Foundation and employee Mike Howell filed a Freedom of Information Act request on March 6, 2024, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeking the Zwonitzer materials. The recordings were made in 2016 and 2017 in Biden’s home for the memoir Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose. Friedrich said the public interest in disclosure under FOIA outweighed the privacy objections Biden had raised, even after she had already found in a May 21 order that he had constitutional standing to intervene in the case.

That earlier ruling said Biden had alleged the recordings touched on sensitive topics, including his son’s illness and death and his decision to run for president in 2016. The court also said disclosure could create concrete privacy harm, comparing it to intrusion upon seclusion. But in Friday’s decision, Friedrich held that the Justice Department’s redactions were enough to blunt those concerns, clearing the department to turn over the material to Heritage.

Biden’s lawyers responded immediately with an emergency motion seeking an injunction pending appeal, arguing that release of the tapes would cause irreversible harm to Biden’s privacy and law-enforcement interests. The dispute now reaches beyond the tapes themselves, because former special counsel Robert Hur relied on the Zwonitzer materials in his classified-documents investigation of Biden. Hur’s report described Biden’s “diminished faculties and faulty memory” and called the ghostwriter recordings “painfully slow,” saying Biden struggled to remember events and read notebook entries.

The records are also part of a broader battle over how much of the Hur investigation should be public, including material sought by Congress and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan. For the Heritage Foundation, the case is more than a records fight: it is a bid to force disclosure of private conversations that became relevant to a special counsel report about Biden’s handling of sensitive government documents. Friedrich’s ruling may now serve as a test case for how far FOIA can reach into the personal archives of a former president once those materials have been used in a public investigation.