Joe Biden is preparing to go to court to stop the Justice Department from releasing roughly 70 hours of audio recordings and written transcripts from his 2017 interviews with a ghostwriter, material that was swept up in Special Counsel Robert Hur's investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents after leaving the Obama administration.
A court filing from Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, submitted Friday in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Heritage Foundation's Mike Howell, laid out the situation plainly. Biden's lawyers face a Tuesday deadline to respond. If they object before then, Fox News Digital reported that the release of the redacted recordings would be delayed until June 15, 2026.
The DOJ itself plans to hand over the material, with redactions, to both the Heritage Foundation plaintiffs and to Congress, in response to a March 23, 2026, request from the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. But Biden, through his legal team, wants to block every avenue of disclosure. And the filing makes clear that his lawyers have been dragging their feet for months.
Shumate's filing is blunt about the timeline. Biden's legal team spent "several months" in negotiations with the DOJ, the filing states, "at no point seeking to intervene into this case on a timely basis." Now, at the last possible moment, Biden has reversed course and wants to stop not just the release of the full audio but even portions of the transcripts that match phrases already quoted in Hur's published report.
The filing describes the situation in terms that amount to an accusation of deliberate stalling:
"President 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) and incredibly indicating that despite the June 15, 2026 production date, the motion to intervene would not be filed until mid-next week and that President Biden would seek up to three days after a ruling granting a motion to intervene to submit a proposed schedule for substantive relief."
The filing continued: "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."
In other words, the DOJ's own lawyers are telling the court that Biden's team is running out the clock. Months of negotiation. No timely motion to intervene. And now a last-second scramble to halt a release that has been on the horizon since Howell first filed his FOIA request.
The DOJ, for its part, said it does not oppose Biden's intervention, but Shumate also wrote that "the public deserves to hear the tapes and read the transcripts as redacted by President Donald J. Trump's Department of Justice."
The recordings capture Biden's 2017 conversations with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer for his memoir Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose. Those interviews were later obtained by Hur's investigators as part of their probe into Biden's retention and mishandling of classified documents after his vice presidency ended.
Hur's investigation found that Biden had stored classified materials at the Penn Biden Center and in his garage. The special counsel concluded his probe without charges, citing longstanding DOJ policy against indicting a sitting president and noting that a jury would likely view Biden as, in Hur's words, "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."
That description became one of the most politically damaging lines of Biden's presidency. And the recordings could shed further light on why Hur reached that conclusion. The Washington Examiner reported that Hur's 2024 report described Biden's memory as "fuzzy," "hazy," and "poor", language that fueled months of scrutiny over whether Biden was fit to serve.
The former president's effort to keep the audio from becoming public is not new. What is new is the intensity of the legal maneuvering and the DOJ's willingness to call it out.
Newsmax reported that the recordings reportedly capture Biden reading from notebooks that investigators determined contained classified information. One line attributed to Biden in Hur's report from the recorded interviews: "just found all the classified stuff downstairs."
That quote alone explains why Biden's team would prefer the tapes never see daylight.
Biden spokesperson TJ Ducklo told Politico on Sunday that his client cooperated fully with Hur and that the audiotapes were provided "on the condition that they would not be made public." Ducklo framed the release effort as partisan:
"What's happening now isn't about transparency. It's about politics."
Ducklo also attempted a deflection, arguing that if the current 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."
That pivot is worth examining. Biden's team is not contesting the authenticity of the recordings. They are not claiming the redactions are insufficient to protect national security. The argument boils down to: we were promised privacy, and releasing the tapes is political.
But a FOIA lawsuit is not a political stunt. It is a legal mechanism designed to hold government accountable. And the DOJ, now under new leadership, has concluded that the redacted material can and should be disclosed to Congress and to the public.
The broader pattern of the Biden family's approach to public accountability is hard to miss. Jill Biden recently announced a memoir promising to "set the record straight" on Joe Biden's 2024 exit from the presidential race, a carefully controlled narrative on the family's own terms.
Mike Howell, who leads Heritage's Oversight Project and filed the original FOIA request, was direct in his response. He told Politico:
"These tapes will further prove the massive lie regarding Biden's fitness for office and the fact Biden revealed classified information."
Howell also characterized Biden's last-minute legal maneuver as more of the same: "The shenanigans aren't over: At the last possible second, and after every delay tactic possible, the autopen is objecting to the American People receiving transparency."
The filing from the plaintiffs' side reinforces that frustration, noting that Biden's lead counsel "repeatedly" failed to engage on the matter and put off "even initial substantive conversations until next week." The plaintiffs said they are "currently unable to assist the Court in this process" because of that stonewalling.
This is not an isolated legal dispute. It sits at the intersection of Biden's classified documents scandal, the questions about his mental fitness that dogged his presidency, and the broader fight over government transparency. The AP previously reported that the Biden White House invoked executive privilege to block release of audio from Biden's special counsel interview, prompting House Judiciary and Oversight committees to advance contempt proceedings against then-Attorney General Merrick Garland along party lines.
At the time, White House counsel Ed Siskel wrote that releasing the recordings would allow opponents to "chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes." Rep. Jim Jordan countered that "the department has a legal obligation to turn over the requested materials pursuant to the subpoena."
Biden left office in January 2025. He is no longer president. Executive privilege claims are far weaker for a former officeholder, and the current DOJ has determined the redacted material should be released.
Yet Biden's lawyers are still fighting, not on the merits of what the tapes contain, but on process. They want more time. They want to file next week. They want three more days after that. The filing calls it what it is: delay for the sake of delay.
Meanwhile, Biden has been reemerging publicly in post-presidency political life, endorsing candidates and positioning himself as an elder statesman. That image becomes harder to maintain if 70 hours of audio confirm the portrait Hur painted, a man whose memory was failing him while he sat on classified material in his garage.
Breitbart noted that the DOJ filing explicitly states it does not oppose Biden's intervention but simultaneously affirms the public's right to hear the tapes, a position that puts the department squarely on the side of disclosure while leaving the courtroom door open for Biden to make his case.
The Biden family's broader approach to damage control has followed a consistent script: cooperate just enough to claim cooperation, then fight disclosure at every turn. The blanket pardon Joe Biden issued to his son Hunter before leaving office fits that mold. So does this.
Biden's lawyers have until Tuesday to formally object. If they do, the release slides to June 15, 2026, and a new round of litigation begins. If they don't, the redacted transcripts and audio go to the House Judiciary Committee and to the Heritage Foundation plaintiffs.
Either way, the DOJ has made its position clear: the public deserves to hear these tapes. The only person fighting to keep them sealed is the man on them.
When someone spends months stalling and then files at the last second to keep recordings of his own voice from the public, the tapes aren't the problem. What's on them is.
