Appeals court lets Heritage Foundation seek Biden biographer transcripts

A federal appeals court denied Joe Biden’s bid to keep the Justice Department from releasing redacted transcripts and audio recordings of his private conversations with biographer and ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer, leaving the records in limbo for now.

The dispute centers on interviews Biden gave in 2016 and 2017 that later became part of the special counsel investigation into his handling of classified documents. Judge Dabney Friedrich had already ruled that the Justice Department could release the material to the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that sought it, but only after a three-week delay so Biden could ask for appellate review. The appeals court first blocked release while it considered the request, then denied Biden’s latest effort to keep the records sealed.

Friedrich’s order matters because it set out the basic legal line in the case: the public interest in the tapes and transcripts outweighed Biden’s privacy claims. That finding gives the Heritage Foundation a path to the records and puts the Justice Department in the middle of a fight over how much access the public should have to investigative files involving a former president. Biden has continued to appeal the release order.

The papers at issue are not ordinary background material. They include redacted transcripts and audio of Biden’s talks with Zwonitzer, and they later surfaced as evidence in the classified-documents inquiry. In July 2024, Justice Department officials found transcripts from an interview with Zwonitzer that prosecutors had previously said they did not have, a discovery that added another layer to the dispute over what existed, when it was found, and how the case was handled.

The recordings have also drawn attention because they are tied to Biden’s 2017 memoir about his son Beau, and Biden has described the conversations as private. That combination of personal material, investigative relevance and public-records law has made the case a test of whether top officials can keep sensitive biographical material out of public view once it enters the government’s hands. For now, the appeals court has not let Biden shut the door.