Former President Joe Biden is preparing to attempt to block the release of audio recordings from his 2017 interviews with the ghostwriter behind his memoir Promise Me, Dad.
The Recordings
The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, filed suit in March 2024 in federal court in Washington, D.C., under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), seeking roughly 70 hours of recordings and transcripts from Biden’s conversations with author Mark Zwonitzer. Separately, the House Judiciary Committee also asked the Justice Department to turn over the same materials.
The recordings were obtained by Special Counsel Robert Hur during his investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents after leaving office as vice president. Investigators found classified materials at Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home and at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., from his time as vice president and senator.
One of the most damaging findings in Hur’s report centered on President Biden’s recorded conversations with Zwonitzer. According to the report, Biden read aloud from notebooks investigators later determined contained classified information. In one quoted exchange, Biden telling the ghostwriter, “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”
Hur ultimately declined to bring criminal charges against then-President Biden. The final report, released in February 2024, concluded that a jury would likely see Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” At the time, President Biden denied he shared classified information, telling reporters, “Guarantee you, I did not.”
In a Friday court filing, the DOJ wrote that it intends to release partially redacted versions of the ghostwriter recordings and transcripts to Heritage and to the House Judiciary Committee, but the DOJ also indicated Biden’s lawyers have advised the department he intends to intervene in the case to prevent the disclosure.
Tuesday marks the deadline for Team Biden to take that legal step. “President 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,” Biden spokesperson TJ Ducklo told Politico in a statement. “The DOJ themselves have said these tapes serve no public interest.”
The Legal Battle
On Tuesday, AM Update spoke with Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project, a nonprofit government watchdog group. The Oversight Project began this effort while it was still under the Heritage Foundation umbrella and is now continuing to partner with the think tank in the legal fight.
Howell shared what he expects the tapes to reveal:
“I think it’s pretty obvious that Joe Biden was very faulty and not of sound mind, and so I expect this is an embarrassing recording for him, which is the motivation behind trying to fight for the release. It’ll help paint a fuller picture of when the decline started and how bad it was… I also think it’ll add context to how the then-former vice president was illegally holding and using classified information, perhaps for private financial gain. Because, keep in mind, the reason he wrote this book is because, and this is in the record, Jill Biden was embarrassed that they didn’t have enough money. You had Hunter running around and making all the money. And so he paid somebody to write a book for him, and I think he was flipping secrets around in order to have a juicier book.”
Howell said that, after years of litigation, Team Biden is only now moving to object, just as the tapes appear close to release:
“This case has been going on for years. And now that it’s on the eve of being released, they’re just seeking to extend that. Jeff Clark, our VP for litigation here, said he’s never seen in his 30 years of practicing a more obvious delay tactic than this. It reeks of politics. I mean, right now, going into midterms, there’s been some articles written about how Biden intends to assert himself more in the political process. And I think they just finally figured out, like, hey, if they’re going to be trotting out Joe Biden again and they’re going to have a probably pretty embarrassing story coming out, they don’t want those two things to happen at the same time. And so their lawyers put two and two together and then decided, oh, holy smokes, we should try to delay the release of the state even longer.”
For Howell, the fight over these tapes is part of a larger question about transparency, accountability, and how the Biden White House operated:
“I’ll say that the matter of how this country was run by an autopen for four years still remains one of the greatest constitutional scandals in American history. I know that it’s kind of lost the spotlight a little bit in recent years with how quickly news moves, but we need to return as a country focused to this issue. Because for all of the talks going on right now about attacks on democracy… there has been nothing more undemocratic than a president, an entire branch of government rather, being outsourced to staff using an autopen. And so when we have potential pieces of evidence, like a long recording of Joe Biden with his ghostwriter, there’s no reason that should not be in the public record and should not be used to inform solutions to ensure something like this never happens again.”
You can get all the day’s headlines by tuning into the AM Update with Megyn Kelly on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch AM Update on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111).