Judge won't block DOJ from releasing Biden conversations with biographer

Washington — A federal judge on Friday cleared the way for the Justice Department to give a conservative think tank a redacted transcript and recordings of former President Joe Biden's decade-old conversations with his biographer, Mark Zwonitzer.

In a 26-page decision, U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich denied Biden's bid to stop the Justice Department from disclosing the material to the Heritage Foundation. The judge said Biden's privacy interests in the case are mitigated by "extensive redactions" by the Justice Department.

The government had agreed to delay the release of the material to the Heritage Foundation until 5 p.m. Friday.

"Biden has not identified any public harm that would arise absent an injunction in this case," Friedrich wrote. "And, as with the Department's FOIA balancing discussed above, the harm to Biden's diminished privacy interest is outweighed by the public's interest in the Zwonitzer materials and FOIA's 'policy of broad disclosure of Government documents in order to ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society.'"

On the heels of Friedrich's decision, Biden's lawyers filed an emergency motion asking the judge to block the disclosure of the transcript and tapes to the Heritage Foundation while it appeals her decision.

"This Court should grant an injunction pending appeal to prevent an irreversible change in the status quo," they wrote. "President Biden's motion for a preliminary injunction raises serious legal questions, and the disclosure of his private conversations cannot be undone. The resulting damage to his privacy and to weighty law enforcement interests will be permanent."

The dispute over Biden's discussions stems from a Freedom of Information Act request that the Heritage Foundation filed in March 2024. The group sought records that former special counsel Robert Hur relied on to write specific portions of his report on Biden's handling of sensitive government records, which included passages referring to the former president's recorded conversations with Zwonitzer in 2016 and 2017.

The interviews were used for Biden's 2017 memoir, "Promise Me, Dad."

Hur's report referenced the former president's "diminished faculties and faulty memory" shown in Zwonitzer's recordings, and called Biden's recorded conversations with his ghostwriter "painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries."

While the Justice Department initially withheld the audio tapes and most of the written transcripts, citing certain FOIA exemptions, the department under President Trump said it intended to disclose the material to Congress and the Heritage Foundation.

Biden moved to intervene and asked the court to issue a preliminary injunction blocking the disclosure. He also filed a separate lawsuit last month that seeks to block the release of the audio files to the House Judiciary Committee. The judge overseeing that case has yet to rule on Biden's effort to prevent the disclosure to lawmakers.

In her decision in the Heritage Foundation case, Friedrich wrote that the department "made substantial redactions to the audio and transcripts since its earlier stance in opposition to release."

The material, she said, does not mention sensitive topics like illness or death, nor any private people, including members of Biden's family. Friedrich said the case involves an "unusually strong public interest" in the release of the conversations.

"In short, this case presents a confluence of significant public disclosures of prosecutorial decision-making, explicit reliance on particular records, and the statements of a high-profile public figure to support the Department's decision," she wrote.

The former president had argued that his conversations with Zwonitzer were never intended to be shared broadly. He said the Justice Department has the recordings only because of Hur's investigation, which resulted in no charges.

Hur said in his report that while the investigation uncovered evidence that Biden "willfully retained and disclosed classified material" after his vice presidency, the evidence didn't establish his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

"It is not ordinary for the Department to abandon its duty to protect law enforcement records containing sensitive personal information, instead offering them up to political operatives," Biden's lawyers wrote in a May filing.