A United States District Court judge released an opinion on Friday denying former President Joe Biden’s request for a preliminary injunction to block the release of tapes and transcripts from a set of 2016-2017 interviews that reportedly show Biden’s illegal handling of classified materials.
In May 2026, Biden sued the U.S. Department of Justice to block the release of more than 70 hours of audio recordings of conversations between himself and his biographer, Mark Zwonitzer. After making redactions for privacy purposes, the DOJ was set to release the tapes to The Heritage Foundation as a result of a 2024 Freedom of Information Act request. Biden tried to block their release, arguing that his privacy interests outweigh the public interest in having access to the information.
District court Judge Dabney Friedrich agreed that the release of the Zwonitzer tapes risks harm to Biden’s personal privacy and reputation. But he went on to rule that the public interest in the tapes outweighs that risk because in 2024, the DOJ “prepared a report detailing evidence that the then-sitting President had, among other things, disclosed classified information to his biographer and … Hur … explicitly relied on the Zwonitzer materials in deciding not to prosecute Biden because of his mental state.”
“These unparalleled circumstances account for the high degree of public interest in materials that were gathered during the course of a law enforcement investigation that resulted in no criminal charges,” the opinion stated.
As The Heritage Foundation argued, the public interest in the Zwonitzer tapes is that they contain evidence that Biden disclosed classified materials in the process of writing his 2017 book Promise Me Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose.
The Hur Report quotes portions of the 2016-2017 Zwonitzer tapes in which Biden reads aloud from material he kept in his home from his time as vice president, and he then seemingly admits to his biographer the information is classified material that “they didn’t even know I have.” The report also claims that the recorded conversations 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 was alerted to potential incriminating information in the Zwonitzer recordings when Special Counsel Robert Hur investigated the president after classified documents were found at his Delaware home. The “Hur Report” was released to the public in February 2024, and it found that Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.” Under normal circumstances, Biden would have faced felony charges.
However, the Hur Report concluded that even though the investigation found incriminating evidence against Biden, the DOJ would not pursue charges against him because “at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
In his 2024 interviews with the Special Counsel’s Office, Biden reportedly forgot when he was vice president, and could “not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died.” Hur also wrote that Biden was showing signs of significant mental impairment in 2017, and this impairment was his primary justification for deciding to forego pressing felony charges against the president.
The Heritage Foundation argued that the release of these tapes is crucial for the American people to decide whether members of the Biden-Harris administration and their media cohorts “covered up” evidence that Biden was unfit to hold office in the first place, tracing evidence of his cognitive decline back multiple years before he became president.
This case also sheds light on the question of whether Biden “actually authorized non-delegable Presidential decisions while actually impaired,” The Heritage Foundation said. If Biden was too mentally impaired in 2017 to be responsible for criminal actions, the question of whether he was responsible for his actions as president becomes even more important.
“Indeed, many of President Biden’s own senior staff testified to a complete lack of such documentation and authorization for use of the autopen on official documents as something cloaked by a game of three-card monte,” Heritage wrote in its legal opposition filing. “In evaluating how such an unprecedented situation should be approached, the American People deserve as much information as possible as to the timeline and depth of President Biden’s cognitive decline.”
As Heritage pointed out in the context of this case, quoting a previous Supreme Court ruling, the president is “the only person who alone composes a branch of government.” If, as is likely, the soon-to-be-released Zwonitzer tapes continue to affirm that Biden’s mental decline began much earlier than the public realized, they could shed further light on the “widespread evidence” that other Democrat party officials, some unelected, were illegally exercising presidential power through the autopen and lying to the American people about it while Joe Biden was cognitively impaired.
“Whether a pardon or a veto is valid is no small matter,” The Heritage Foundation argued. “Moreover, whether President Biden did, in fact, leak classified information, whether President Biden was in fact impaired, and whether senior Members of the Biden-Harris Administration covered up Biden’s apparent cognitive decline is and will continue to be a salient issue[] in the upcoming 2026 Election.”
Friedrich also ordered the release of the transcripts and recordings delayed three weeks to give an appeals court time to consider Biden’s motion for a pause on Friedrich’s ruling allowing the release.
