The Trump Justice Department was, until a federal appeals court stepped in Friday, about to hand over Joe Biden's private recorded conversations to a conservative think tank. Not to Congress for some urgent oversight purpose. To the Heritage Foundation. Let that sit for a second.
What These Tapes Actually Are
Back in 2016 and 2017, Joe Biden sat down with his biographer, Mark Zwonitzer, to talk through memories and materials for his memoir, 'Promise Me, Dad.' Private conversations. The kind you have when you're trying to tell your own story, not testify before a grand jury.
Those recordings ended up in federal hands because special counsel Robert Hur vacuumed them up during his investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents after his vice presidency. Hur ultimately declined to charge Biden with any crime. He did, however, spend considerable ink in his 2024 report describing Biden as having 'diminished faculties and faulty memory,' using the Zwonitzer recordings as his evidence. The political damage from those passages was immediate and severe.
So to recap: private recordings, made for a personal memoir, collected by a criminal investigation that went nowhere, and now being treated as public property that a think tank has a right to inspect. This is the chain of custody for Joe Biden's personal memories in 2026.
Enter Heritage, Stage Hard Right
The Heritage Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the tapes and transcripts shortly after Hur's report dropped in 2024. When the Biden Justice Department cited FOIA exemptions and largely refused to hand them over, Heritage sued.
Then Trump won. And suddenly the Justice Department's position on whether to release private recordings of a political opponent to a conservative organization shifted dramatically. The department announced it intended to give the material to both Congress and the Heritage Foundation. Amazing how that works.
Biden moved to intervene in the lawsuit Heritage had filed. A federal judge, Dabney Friedrich, initially rejected his request to block the disclosure, though she did agree to pause things for three weeks to give the D.C. Circuit time to weigh in. That pause was set to expire at 5 p.m. Friday.
The Appeals Court Pumps the Brakes
A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued an administrative injunction Friday blocking the release for 10 days, until 11:59 p.m. on July 20. CBS News reports the court was clear that this move is purely procedural, buying the judges time to actually consider the emergency motion for a longer injunction. It is explicitly not a ruling on the merits.
In other words: nothing is settled. The court just hit pause long enough to think about whether to keep hitting pause. Biden's team is still fighting. The Justice Department and Heritage are still pushing. And the clock is running.
Biden's Lawyers Make the Obvious Argument
Biden's legal team argued to the D.C. Circuit that handing these recordings over is roughly equivalent to forcing someone to publish their diary or private text messages. According to CBS News, they wrote in a filing that 'the private conversations at issue were never intended to be shared with a wider audience, and the Department has them only because it collected the recordings as part of a criminal investigation that resulted in no charges.'
They also pointed out, fairly reasonably, that there is no urgent public interest requiring the Heritage Foundation to get these files right now. The FOIA case has been sitting for nearly two and a half years. Biden is a private citizen. He is not running for anything. Whatever Heritage plans to do with decade-old recordings of a man discussing his memoir, it is not time-sensitive.
'There is no meaningful public interest,' his lawyers argued, 'let alone one that must be satisfied in the immediate days or weeks, in the disclosure of decade-old conversations of a former President who is now a private citizen, and who neither holds nor is seeking public office.'
The DOJ's Argument Is What It Is
The Justice Department's counter-argument, as reported by CBS News, is that releasing the material 'will allow the public to assess the persuasiveness of Hur's determinations.' Transparency. Accountability. The public's right to know.
This is the same Justice Department that is actively working to bury investigations into Trump allies, defund oversight mechanisms, and in several cases literally drop charges against people who stormed the Capitol. Their sudden deep commitment to FOIA transparency specifically for materials that embarrassed a Democratic president is, to put it gently, selective.
Heritage, for its part, is not a disinterested public interest organization asking hard questions about government accountability. It is the organization that wrote Project 2025. Its interest in these tapes is not academic.
The Dingo Take
Here is the part where we are supposed to pretend this is a complicated legal question about the proper scope of FOIA exemptions and the rights of former presidents to privacy in criminal investigations. And sure, those questions are real. Courts will sort them out.
But the story underneath the legal scaffolding is straightforward. The Trump administration inherited recordings that made Biden look bad, collected by a special counsel who declined to charge Biden with anything, and immediately moved to give them to an organization that exists to advance Republican political goals. The Justice Department is not releasing these tapes because it has a principled commitment to government transparency. It is releasing them because they are useful.
The appeals court bought Biden ten days. Whether that becomes a longer stay or whether Heritage eventually gets everything it asked for, the damage from the Hur report is already baked in. What this fight is really about is whether a private citizen gets to keep a conversation he had with his biographer from becoming a Heritage Foundation content farm. That this is even a question says something genuinely grim about where we are.
