Judge clears DOJ to hand Biden recordings to conservative group

Zoe Tillman, Bloomberg News on Jun 19, 2026

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A federal judge in Washington denied former President Joe Biden’s request to block the Justice Department from turning over tapes and transcripts of interviews he privately recorded almost a decade ago to a conservative advocacy group.

The Justice Department is poised to produce the materials to the Heritage Foundation. U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich on Friday rejected Biden’s request for an immediate order halting the disclosure while he presses his claims to keep the materials out of the public eye.

Biden’s lawyers immediately alerted the judge that they intend to challenge her decision before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, and asked Friedrich to temporarily stop the disclosure in the meantime. An attorney for the former president didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Friedrich wrote that Biden failed to prove at this stage that the Justice Department’s decision to release the materials was an abuse of officials’ discretion in weighing his privacy against the public’s interest in the contents. Certain portions would be redacted, the judge said, such as information about Biden’s family and health issues.

Spokespeople for the foundation and DOJ didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on a public holiday Friday.

Biden has been opposing efforts by the Trump administration to release the recordings, which he made in 2016 and 2017 with a memoir-writing partner. The Heritage Foundation and congressional Republicans have been trying to get the recordings and unredacted interview transcripts following a 2024 report that cited them as proof of Biden’s “diminished” mental state.

Separate from the case before Friedrich, Biden filed a lawsuit in May seeking to block the Justice Department from giving the materials to the Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee.

The judge presiding over the committee’s case hasn’t ruled yet on Biden’s request to immediately stop that disclosure.

The Heritage Foundation sued to compel the Justice Department under the Freedom of Information Act. The government released redacted pages of transcripts but otherwise opposed Heritage’s case before Trump returned to the White House.

The recordings and transcripts are expected to become public if Biden loses either case.

Former Justice Department special counsel Robert Hur obtained the materials as part of an investigation into Biden’s handling of classified information, particularly after his tenure as vice president ended in 2017. Hur concluded that Biden held on to sensitive information once he became a private citizen but that criminal charges weren’t warranted.

Hur wrote that Biden displayed “diminished faculties and faulty memory” in the interviews with his ghostwriter. While Biden pushed back on the characterization, the report fueled concerns by both allies and opponents about his 2024 bid for a second term in the White House. Biden ended his campaign several months after Hur’s report came out.

Friedrich wrote that the case involved “an unusually strong public interest in the release” of government records.

“This case presents a confluence of significant public disclosures of prosecutorial decision-making, explicit reliance on particular records, and the statements of a high-profile public figure to support the department’s decision,” she wrote.

Biden’s lawyers contend that disclosure “would constitute an unwarranted invasion of President Biden’s privacy.” They also accused the Justice Department of getting a “pretextual” request from the House Judiciary Committee to ensure the materials would be released regardless of what happened in the Heritage Foundation’s litigation.

The Heritage Foundation argued that given the significance of Hur’s investigation and controversy surrounding the decision not to pursue criminal charges, “the public has a right to see the critical underlying evidence.”

House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan has said that lawmakers have an interest in the information as part of their oversight investigation into how Biden’s Justice Department used special counsels. In a May letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, he disputed the “pretext” allegation, saying the committee had made earlier demands for the recordings.

The case is Heritage Foundation v. Department of Justice, 24-cv-645, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia.

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