A federal appeals court has temporarily halted the release of roughly 70 hours of audio recordings from President Joe Biden’s interviews with his ghostwriter, granting him a brief reprieve while the court considers his emergency request to keep the tapes from becoming public.
On Friday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan along with Judges Gregory Katsas and Florence Pan — issued an administrative injunction preventing the Department of Justice from turning over the recordings to the Heritage Foundation and Mike Howell, the former director of its Oversight Project, until 11:59 p.m. on July 20.
The judges made clear that the temporary order is intended solely to maintain the current situation while they consider Biden’s request for a longer-lasting injunction during the appeals process. According to CBS News, the unsigned order emphasized that it “should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits.”
The appellate court’s action temporarily suspends a June decision by U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, who ruled against Biden’s attempt to keep the recordings confidential under the Freedom of Information Act.
In her ruling, Friedrich weighed FOIA’s presumption in favor of public disclosure against Biden’s privacy claims and determined that, after redactions made by the Justice Department, the recordings “contain no information about Biden’s family or other private persons.” She ultimately concluded that the public’s interest in the material outweighed what she described as Biden’s reduced expectation of privacy.
The recordings stem from interviews Biden conducted in 2016 and 2017 with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer while preparing his memoir, Promise Me, Dad.
Federal investigators later obtained the audio as part of former Special Counsel Robert Hur’s probe into Biden’s handling of classified documents after leaving the vice presidency.
Hur’s report, released in February 2024, concluded that Biden had willfully retained and disclosed classified information, including by reading portions aloud to Zwonitzer. However, Hur declined to recommend criminal charges, writing that a jury would likely view Biden as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The Heritage Foundation requested access to the recordings through a Freedom of Information Act request filed in 2024.
Although the Biden Justice Department denied that request, the Trump administration reversed that position earlier this year, prompting Biden to intervene in court and file suit, arguing that the recordings captured private conversations conducted inside his home.
“We are monitoring the situation and, as always, will do whatever is in the best interest of getting these tapes out to the American people as fast as possible,” Howell told the Washington Examiner.
The D.C. Circuit is expected to decide before July 20 whether Biden should receive a longer injunction while his appeal continues. Until then, the temporary order blocking the release of the recordings remains in place.
{Matzav.com}