Appeals Court Lifts Injunction on Biden Ghostwriter Tapes

The decision allows the DOJ to release audio recordings and transcripts to the House Judiciary Committee and The Heritage ​Foundation.

The former President Joe Biden delivers his farewell address to the nation from the Oval Office of the White House on Jan. 15, 2025. Mandel Ngan - Pool/Getty Images

A federal appeals court ruled on July 27 that the Department of Justice (DOJ) can release audio recordings and transcripts of former President Joe Biden’s conversations that he had with a ghostwriter for his 2017 memoir.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals dissolved its temporary administrative injunction that had blocked the disclosure of the materials, which the DOJ has claimed proves that Biden suffered from “significant decline” in his cognitive abilities as far back as 2016, after the former president dropped his effort to block them on July 24.

Biden dropped his lawsuit against the DOJ last week.

The Epoch Times reached out to the former president and his legal team regarding the July 27 development but did not receive a response by publication time.

The court’s ruling allows the recordings and transcripts to be released to the House Judiciary Committee and conservative think tank The Heritage ​Foundation, which had requested the records through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.

It had sought to obtain the records following former special counsel Robert Hur’s years-long investigation into Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.

In Hur’s investigation, he relied on recordings and transcripts that the former president had of conversations with his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, in Biden’s home between 2016 and 2017 for his memoir titled “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose.”

No charges were brought in connection with Hur’s investigation.

However, in the 345-page report Hur released in February 2024, he found that Biden did willfully retain classified materials and noted his “diminished faculties and faulty memory.”

Hur said that it would be “difficult to convince a jury that they should convict [Biden]—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”

The former special counsel further described the ghostwriter tapes as “painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.”

The Heritage ​Foundation’s FOIA request for those records was denied by the DOJ, then under Biden, citing privacy and national security concerns as well as multiple FOIA exemptions, prompting the group to sue in March 2024.

A previous court ruling had been in favor of the conservative think tank, but the judge stayed her order to allow time for Biden and his legal team to appeal. The judge also noted that the case “involves an unusually strong public interest in the release of law enforcement materials,” outweighing Biden’s privacy claims.

After the former president’s lawyers appealed to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, that court upheld on July 20 the previous judge’s order, writing that “Biden has not shown a likelihood of success on the merits.”

The former president’s filing to drop his efforts came just days later.