An appeals court on Friday temporarily blocked the Justice Department from releasing audio recordings of former President Joe Biden’s interviews with his ghostwriter, granting a 10-day administrative pause while it considers Biden’s emergency appeal. A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, comprised of Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, Judge Gregory Katsas, and Judge Florence Pan, ordered the DOJ not to release the contested recordings to the Heritage Foundation and its former Oversight Project director, Mike Howell, until 11:59 p.m. on July 20. The panel explained that the administrative injunction is intended only to preserve the status quo while it reviews Biden’s request for a longer injunction pending appeal and “should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits.”
The order temporarily halts a ruling from U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, an appointee of President Donald Trump, who last month rejected Biden’s effort to block disclosure of roughly 70 hours of audio recordings. The recordings stem from Biden’s interviews with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer while the two worked on Biden’s 2017 memoir, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose. The DOJ later obtained the recordings during former special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into whether Biden improperly retained and disclosed classified information after serving as vice president.
The Heritage Foundation first sought the recordings through a Freedom of Information Act request. The recordings date back to 2016 and 2017, when Biden sat down with his biographer for his memoir. The Heritage Foundation filed the request following the release of Hur’s report in 2024, which referenced Biden’s conversations with Zwonitzer. The report described Biden’s “diminished faculties and faulty memory,” noting that his conversations with Zwonitzer were “painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.”
The Heritage Foundation, which previously operated as an extension of the Heritage Foundation but became independent in March 2023, has been pushing for the release of the material. Howell told the Washington Examiner that the group is monitoring the situation and will do whatever is in the best interest of getting the tapes out to the American people as fast as possible.