Joe Biden just stopped fighting the release of tapes that reportedly show him struggling to read his own notebook entries. The same week, Donald Trump asked the Supreme Court, for the second time, to help him escape a jury verdict finding he sexually assaulted a woman and owes her five million dollars. One of these men is described as the one with the memory problem.
What the Tapes Actually Are
Here is the basic situation. In 2017, Biden sat for several hours of recorded interviews with the ghostwriter helping him produce his memoir, Promise Me, Dad. That's it. That's the origin of these tapes. A former vice president talking through his own life story with a writer.
Fast forward to 2022, when Biden was president and disclosed to the Justice Department that he had found classified documents at his Wilmington home. The DOJ launched an investigation, scooped up every piece of relevant material it could find, and that's how a book interview became evidence in a federal inquiry.
Special prosecutor Robert Hur cleared Biden of criminal charges in 2024, concluding that prosecuting him was not warranted. But Hur's report torched Biden anyway, describing him as a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." The report also said the ghostwriter tapes were "painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries." Democrats spent the next several months insisting this characterization was unfair and overblown. Then Biden debated Donald Trump on live television and the argument became considerably harder to make.
Two Years of Lawyers, Then Instant Surrender
The Heritage Foundation sued in April 2024 to get the tapes made public. The Justice Department, including during Trump's first year back in office, fought against releasing them, arguing that handing over private recordings would be like releasing "entries in a personal diary." Then, in May of this year, the DOJ simply reversed course and said it planned to release everything. No real explanation. Just: never mind, actually.
Biden jumped into the lawsuit after that flip, with his lawyers arguing his privacy interests outweighed the public's right to hear recordings of him going through paperwork while writing a book. Two courts disagreed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit refused to block the release, and the ruling wasn't even a partisan split. Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, an Obama appointee, and Judge Gregory Katsas, a Trump appointee, both ruled against Biden. Only a Biden appointee dissented.
Faced with those odds, Biden's team filed a voluntary dismissal Friday, ending the legal fight entirely. According to NPR's reporting from Nina Totenberg and Grady Martin, Biden's team will now hand the tapes and transcripts directly to the Heritage Foundation. Jeffrey Clark, a Trump ally and vice president for litigation at the Oversight Project, told NPR his group plans to post everything online immediately. "We'll put out a link," he said. "It's not more complicated than that."
What the Tapes Are Actually Going to Sound Like
Conservative groups have been hyping these recordings as some kind of smoking gun that will finally prove Biden was cognitively unfit before the 2024 election. Jeffrey Clark told NPR the tapes will reveal "the state of Joe Biden years before he ran for president, when a special prosecutor said he has memory issues."
A source familiar with the recordings told NPR they are "painfully boring" in the literal sense: Biden going through documents one by one, reading them, and talking about them. That's the tape. A man doing the least glamorous part of writing a memoir.
The source who described them as boring also happens to be correct that there's a larger principle at stake here. A Biden source told NPR, on background, that if private conversations recorded during a criminal investigation can simply be handed to a conservative think tank, that is a "dangerous" prescription for how the government can use its power against private individuals. That's a reasonable concern. It's also a concern Biden's team probably should have raised more forcefully before the courts ran out of patience.
Meanwhile, in the Other Courtroom
While Biden was folding his legal hand, Donald Trump was doing the opposite. As NPR reports, Trump asked the Supreme Court this week to hear, for a second time, his challenge to the jury verdict ordering him to pay E. Jean Carroll five million dollars for sexually assaulting her in 1996 and defaming her after she went public about it.
The Supreme Court has already declined to take this case once. Asking them again is, according to NPR, extraordinarily rare. The last time the court agreed to revisit a previously rejected case was in 2018. Legal experts don't give Trump's second bite at this apple great odds. None of that stops him from trying.
This is the contrast NPR's coverage lays out plainly: Biden drops a fight over book tapes after two courts rule against him. Trump, found liable by a jury for sexual assault, keeps asking every court he can find to make the whole thing go away. One guy gave up. The other guy never does, regardless of what the facts or the verdicts say.
The Dingo Take
The right is going to have a field day with these tapes, and honestly, some of that is deserved. Democrats spent the better part of 2024 insisting that Robert Hur's portrait of Biden as a man with memory problems was a Republican smear job and prosecutorial overreach. Then Biden got on a debate stage and seemed to confirm everything Hur had written. The tapes may or may not be damning. But the two years of Democrats dismissing legitimate concerns about Biden's fitness, while he was the sitting president with access to the nuclear codes, is a chapter the party is going to have to reckon with for a long time.
That said, let's be precise about what is actually happening here. The Trump Justice Department, after initially continuing to block the tapes, did a 180 and decided to release private recordings from a criminal investigation to a conservative think tank for immediate publication. Whatever you think of Biden, that is the government using law enforcement machinery as a political weapon against a private citizen. The Biden source who called it "dangerous" is right. It's just that Biden's team waited until after two courts had already rejected their arguments to make that point loudly enough for anyone to care.
And look: somewhere in the background of all of this is a man who a jury found sexually assaulted a woman, who has been ordered to pay her five million dollars, and who is currently asking the Supreme Court to please, please make it stop. For the second time. The guy with the memory problem gave up his legal fight after losing in court. The other guy just keeps going, facts and verdicts be damned. Draw your own conclusions about which behavior should concern us more.
