Joe Biden's lawyers are preparing to intervene in federal court to stop the Justice Department from releasing roughly 70 hours of redacted audio recordings and written transcripts from the former president's 2017 conversations with his book ghostwriter, material gathered during Special Counsel Robert Hur's investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents.
The move, disclosed in a Friday court filing reported by Fox News Digital, comes just ahead of a Tuesday deadline for Biden's legal team to formally respond. If Biden objects before that deadline, the release of the recordings would be delayed until at least June 15, 2026.
Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, heading the DOJ's Civil Division, wrote that Biden "through counsel, has advised the Department that he intends to seek to intervene to prevent any such disclosures." Shumate added a line that may raise eyebrows: "The Department does not oppose intervention."
The filing lays out a pointed timeline. The DOJ intended to disclose the written transcripts and audio recordings, with redactions, both to Congress, in response to a request from the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, and to plaintiffs in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project.
But Biden's legal team, the filing alleges, dragged its feet for months. Shumate's filing states that Biden's counsel engaged in "lengthy negotiation covering several months, at no point seeking to intervene into this case on a timely basis." Now, at the eleventh hour, Biden "has changed position and now seeks to even enjoin release of the portions of transcripts that match exact phrases quoted in the Hur Report."
The filing's language grows sharper from there. It notes that Biden's lead counsel "was unable to provide any information about President Biden's submissions arguing that such discussion was somehow premature (whereas, in reality it is 16 months late)." The filing says Biden's attorneys indicated that despite the June 15, 2026 production date, "the motion to intervene would not be filed until mid-next week" and that Biden's team would then seek "up to three days after a ruling granting a motion to intervene to submit a proposed schedule for substantive relief."
The filing calls this approach what it looks like:
"That is no way to conduct litigation and smacks of kicking the can down the road to justify delaying the June 15, 2026 production by some form of administrative injunction."
Heritage Foundation Oversight Project president Mike Howell, who filed the original FOIA request, did not mince words. He told Politico that "these tapes will further prove the massive lie regarding Biden's fitness for office and the fact Biden revealed classified information." He added that "at the last possible second, and after every delay tactic possible, the autopen is objecting to the American People receiving transparency."
The audio at issue stems from Biden's 2017 sessions with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer while working on the memoir Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose. Those recordings became central to Hur's classified documents investigation, which examined how Biden stored classified materials at the Penn Biden Center and in his garage after leaving the vice presidency.
Hur's report described Biden as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory", a characterization that became a political flashpoint when it was released in February 2024. Hur concluded that while evidence existed that Biden willfully retained classified material, he declined to bring charges, citing in part the longstanding DOJ policy against indicting a sitting president and Biden's likely appearance to a jury.
Newsmax reported that the recordings include Biden reading from notebooks that investigators said contained classified information. The DOJ has said any release would be redacted to remove classified material and protect privacy. But for Biden's team, even redacted disclosure is apparently too much.
The broader fight over these recordings has been grinding through Washington for more than two years. AP News reported that House Republicans on the Judiciary and Oversight committees previously voted along party lines to advance contempt of Congress charges against then-Attorney General Merrick Garland after the Biden White House blocked release of the Hur interview audio by asserting executive privilege. Rep. Jim Jordan stated at the time: "The department has a legal obligation to turn over the requested materials pursuant to the subpoena."
The Biden administration's resistance was consistent. White House counsel Ed Siskel wrote that "the absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal, to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes." Garland argued a transcript had already been provided and warned that releasing the audio could harm future investigations and witness cooperation.
But when portions of the Hur interview audio were eventually released, the recordings painted a picture the transcript alone did not fully convey. National Review reported that the audio captured long pauses, rambling answers, and Biden's failure to recall key dates, including the year his son Beau died and the timing of Donald Trump's first election. In one exchange, Biden said: "OK, yeah. In 2017, Beau had passed." Beau Biden died in 2015.
The gap between the written transcript and the audio experience was significant enough that even mainstream media figures took notice. CNN's Jake Tapper, reacting to the audio during an NPR appearance, said Biden sounded "clearly unfit," according to Breitbart's coverage, a stark assessment given that the full transcript had been publicly available since March 2024. The audio added what the printed word could not: the sound of a man struggling in real time.
That context makes Biden's current legal maneuver all the more telling. The 2017 ghostwriter recordings are a separate set of material from the October 2023 Hur interview audio, but they come from the same investigation and carry the same political risk. If the Hur interview audio was damaging, the prospect of 70 hours of additional recordings, even redacted, clearly alarms Biden's camp enough to mount a last-ditch court fight.
Biden spokesperson TJ Ducklo offered a statement to Politico framing the release effort as politically motivated. He said Biden "cooperated fully with special counsel Hur, and agreed to provide audiotapes of conversations with his biographer for a book about his deceased son on the condition that they would not be made public."
"What's happening now isn't about transparency. It's about politics."
Ducklo added that "the DOJ themselves have said these tapes serve no public interest." He then pivoted to offense, arguing that "if this Administration were genuinely committed to transparency, they would release Volume 2 of Special Counsel Jack Smith's report on Donald Trump's own alleged mishandling of classified documents. That report contains information Americans actually deserve to see."
The deflection is notable. Biden's team is not arguing the recordings don't exist, or that they were improperly obtained, or that the FOIA request lacks legal standing. The argument boils down to a claimed gentleman's agreement, that Biden handed over the tapes expecting they'd stay private, and an assertion that releasing them serves no legitimate purpose.
The court filing from Shumate suggests the DOJ under the current administration sees it differently. The filing states plainly: "The public deserves to hear the tapes and read the transcripts as redacted by President Donald J. Trump's Department of Justice." It also notes that plaintiffs "regret that they are currently unable to assist the Court in this process due to the repeated failure of counsel for President Biden to engage with Plaintiffs on this matter, putting off even initial substantive conversations until next week."
This latest chapter fits a broader pattern of Biden-era accountability questions now surfacing under the current DOJ. Across multiple fronts, investigators and task forces have been revisiting decisions and practices from the previous administration.
The immediate question is whether Biden's lawyers will meet the Tuesday deadline to formally object. If they do, the June 15, 2026 date becomes the next battleground. The House Judiciary Committee's March 23, 2026 letter requesting the materials adds congressional pressure on top of the FOIA litigation.
For Heritage's Howell, the fight is straightforward: the public paid for the investigation, and the public is entitled to the results. For Biden, the calculation is equally clear, 70 hours of audio from a period when he was a private citizen discussing classified material with a ghostwriter is not something any legal team wants in the public domain.
The DOJ's handling of Biden-era investigations continues to generate headlines as the current administration reviews past decisions. Meanwhile, questions about how the Biden White House managed politically sensitive legal matters remain very much alive.
House Republicans first demanded these recordings more than two years ago, threatening subpoenas if the DOJ refused to comply. They also sought documents related to a December 2015 Biden call with then-Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, as well as DOJ and White House communications about Hur's report. The classified documents probe touched on concerns that Biden "may have retained sensitive documents related to specific countries involving his family's foreign business dealings," as the committee chairmen wrote to Garland at the time.
The DOJ's willingness to pursue politically uncomfortable investigations under new leadership stands in sharp contrast to the prior administration's instinct to shield Biden from disclosure.
Biden's team says this is about politics. But a man who spent decades in public life, who stored classified documents in his garage, who sat for interviews investigators deemed essential to a federal probe, that man does not get to dictate the terms of public accountability after the fact. Cooperation with an investigation does not come with a side deal to bury the evidence.
If the tapes truly contain nothing damaging, releasing them costs Biden nothing. If they do contain something damaging, the public has every right to hear it. Either way, fighting disclosure at the last possible second, after months of foot-dragging, tells its own story.
Transparency is not a buffet where former presidents get to pick which dishes the public sees.
