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A federal appeals court on Monday rejected former President Biden’s request to prevent audio recordings and transcripts from decade-old interviews he gave to his memoir ghostwriter from becoming public.
A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit suspended its decision until Aug. 3 to allow Biden enough time to seek an appeal.
In a 2-1 decision released Monday, the panel determined that there was “substantial” public interest in releasing the material that Biden sought to keep private.
“We conclude that any remaining incursion on personal privacy from disclosure of the now-redacted materials likely does not outweigh the public interest in disclosure,” Judges Sri Srinivasan and Gregory Katsas wrote in their majority opinion.
Srinivasan was appointed by former President Obama and Katsas was appointed by President Trump during his first term.
Judge Florence Pan, who was appointed by Biden, dissented.
“In my view, Biden has shown a substantial privacy interest,” she wrote in her dissenting opinion. “The conversations at issue took place in Biden’s home, and the recordings of them were obtained by the government in the course of a criminal investigation that did not lead to an indictment.”
The recordings were from conversations Biden had with Mark Zwonitzer, who worked with the former president on two memoirs: “Promises to Keep” published in 2007 and “Promise Me, Dad” published in 2017.
Zwonitzer interviewed Biden at his home in 2016 and 2017, and Biden’s lawyers argued the conversations needed to remain private.
The majority acknowledged that Biden has a privacy interest in the conversations that took place in his home but concluded that the Justice Department’s redactions to the materials sufficiently reduced those concerns.
The Heritage Foundation sued in 2024 under the Freedom of Information Act, seeking the recordings and transcripts following an investigation led by former special counsel Robert Hur into Biden’s handling of classified documents.
The Justice Department initially withheld most of the materials, but earlier this year it said it intended to release redacted versions, prompting Biden’s lawyers to intervene and block their release.
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