Appeals court rejects Biden bid to withhold ghostwriter interview tapes
AP reports an appeals court denied Joe Biden’s effort to keep pre-presidency memoir interview recordings and transcripts sealed.
A federal appeals court has rejected former President Joe Biden’s bid to keep sealed the audio recordings and transcripts of interviews he conducted with a memoir ghostwriter before taking office, according to The Associated Press.
Court ruling
The AP reported that a federal appeals court panel, in a 2-1 decision issued late Monday, denied Biden’s request to block release of the materials. NBC News, citing the same ruling, said the majority found a “substantial” public interest in disclosure of the recordings and transcripts that Biden sought to withhold.
The dispute centers on interviews recorded for a pre-presidency memoir project. According to AP and other outlets summarizing the case, the materials later became part of the Justice Department’s classified-documents investigation led by special counsel Robert Hur. Reporting on X and wire accounts identified the ghostwriter as Mark Zwonitzer.
Background of the records
Hur’s team obtained recordings and related materials while examining how Biden handled classified information after leaving the vice presidency and before becoming president, news accounts have said. Hur ultimately declined to bring criminal charges. His report discussed Biden’s memory and the difficulty of proving willful misconduct at trial, according to contemporaneous coverage of the investigation.
The tapes and transcripts later became the subject of Freedom of Information Act litigation. A conservative group sought release of the materials from the government. In June, a federal district judge rejected Biden’s effort to stop the Trump administration from turning the records over, Newsmax and other outlets reported at the time, identifying U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich as the judge who ruled for disclosure at that stage.
Privacy claims and public interest
Biden’s legal challenge has rested in part on privacy concerns. Accounts of the litigation, including commentary circulating with the appeals court coverage, have said his team argued that portions of the interviews involve personal matters, including family illness and loss. The appeals panel majority, as summarized by NBC News, weighed those interests against what it described as a substantial public interest in the materials given their use in a special counsel probe of a then-sitting president.
Some posts summarizing the ruling said the court delayed the effect of its decision until Aug. 3 to allow further appellate steps, including a possible request to the Supreme Court. That timing detail has been reported in secondary accounts of the order and has not been independently detailed in the brief AP and NBC headlines alone.
What comes next
The immediate effect of the appeals court decision, as described by AP, is that Biden’s bid to keep the recordings and transcripts sealed was rejected. Whether the materials are released promptly depends on any further stays, additional appeals, and how the Justice Department and the requesting organization proceed under the court orders.
The case remains tied to broader questions about transparency of investigative records involving former presidents and about the scope of privacy claims when such records enter federal criminal investigations. No public release of the full audio or transcripts was confirmed in the initial AP and NBC reports on the appeals court order.