Former president Joe Biden will not appeal a court ruling that allows the Justice Department to disclose audio recordings and transcripts of his 2017 conversations with a ghostwriter, effectively ending the legal fight over the records.
Biden’s lawyers filed a notice of voluntary dismissal Friday in a related case, a move that leaves in place the court orders permitting release and hands a victory to the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that sued to obtain the materials.
The recordings were made in 2017 as Biden, then retired from the vice presidency, spent hours with a writer working on his memoir Promise Me, Dad. The Justice Department collected the tapes as part of a 2022 inquiry that began after Biden reported finding classified documents at his Wilmington, Delaware, home.
In 2024, special counsel Robert Hur concluded that while Biden had taken some classified documents to his home, criminal charges were not warranted. Hur’s report described Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” and characterized the ghostwriter tapes as slow and disjointed, with Biden at times struggling to recall events and to read aloud notebook entries.
Conservative activists say the tapes could corroborate concerns about Biden’s mental acuity leading up to the 2024 election. Jeffrey Clark, a Trump ally involved in litigation to obtain the records, said groups that sued plan to publish the full audio and transcripts immediately after they are released.
At the time Hur’s report drew broad attention, Biden criticized its characterization of him as misleading and inaccurate. A person familiar with the 2017 sessions described the recordings as “painfully boring,” consisting largely of Biden reading documents and talking through them. Biden later withdrew from the 2024 presidential race after a widely panned debate performance.
The litigation over the tapes began in April 2024. For nearly two years the Justice Department resisted disclosure, arguing the material was akin to private diary entries. In May of this year, however, the department reversed course and told the court it planned to disclose the written transcripts and audio recordings.
Biden intervened in the lawsuit, arguing that his privacy interests, along with privacy and other legal protections, outweighed any public interest in the materials. Two lower courts disagreed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit refused to enjoin the release; the panel’s majority included Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, an Obama appointee, and Judge Gregory Katsas, a Trump appointee. Judge Florence Pan, a Biden appointee, dissented.
Faced with the likelihood that the records would be released, Biden’s team opted to withdraw further legal challenges and allow the tapes and related documents to be turned over to the Heritage Foundation. A Biden aide, speaking on background, warned that permitting the government to hand private, off-the-record conversations about a book to a private organization sets a dangerous precedent for governmental power over personal materials.
The Justice Department declined to comment for this report.
Biden’s decision to step back from further litigation contrasts with former president Donald Trump’s persistently aggressive legal posture. Even as Biden was ending his challenge, Trump was again asking the Supreme Court to review a jury verdict ordering him to pay $5 million to E. Jean Carroll — a request that underscores the very different approaches each ex‑president has taken toward prolonged court battles.