Left: Former President Joe Biden speaks to the South Carolina Democratic Party, Feb. 27, 2026, in Columbia, S.C. (AP Photo/Matt Kelley, File). Right: Former special counsel Robert Hur testifies before the House Judiciary Committee on March 12, 2024 (Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images).
A federal court of appeals on Friday issued a pause on a lower court's order that directed the U.S. Department of Justice to turn over hours of audio interviews with Joe Biden to a conservative think tank.
For over two years, the Heritage Foundation has sought audiotapes and transcripts from former special counsel Robert Hur's classified documents probe under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.
And for nearly just as long, the DOJ has opposed the request.
In May of this year, Biden himself intervened in the ongoing litigation, accusing the Trump administration of "abandoning the core tenets of American justice and forsaking its duty to protect law enforcement files" by reversing course on a subset of the Hur materials.
Specifically, some "70 hours of audio recordings" of Biden speaking with author and documentarian Mark Zwonitzer regarding the 46th president's memoir, "Promise Me, Dad," were deleted but recovered as part of Hur's investigation into Biden's retention of documents about U.S. "military and foreign policy in Afghanistan."
Earlier this year, the Trump administration dropped its opposition to the release of the disputed audio materials.
Heritage has long alleged the Zwonitzer tapes are proof positive that Biden mishandled classified information.
Biden has consistently maintained he did nothing wrong — despite Hur's own conclusion that Biden did, in fact, likely break the law while declining to prosecute, because a jury wouldn't convict a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."
In one section of the report, Hur said Biden's "diminished faculties and faulty memory" would "likely appear consistent" with his "apparent lapses and failures" regarding the documents in question.
On June 19, U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, a Donald Trump appointee, said Biden's privacy interests, "though substantial," must take a back seat to the public's right to information about its leaders.
"Biden has not identified any public harm that would arise absent an injunction in this case," the lower court reasoned. "[T]he harm to Biden's diminished privacy interest is outweighed by the public's interest in the Zwonitzer materials and FOIA's 'policy of broad disclosure of Government documents in order to ensure an informed citizenry, vital to the functioning of a democratic society.'"
Biden appealed immediately to keep the tapes under lock and key.
In subsequent orders issued that same day, Friedrich issued a terse emergency injunction and then a separate memorandum opinion explaining that the DOJ was enjoined "from disclosing the Zwonitzer materials to the plaintiffs for a period of three weeks to permit the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit an orderly period to consider whether to grant an injunction pending appeal."
That three-week deadline was set to expire on Friday.
The court of appeals has simply extended the ongoing pause.
Now, the DOJ is bound by an administrative injunction that bars the government "from releasing the contested Zwonitzer materials to the Heritage Foundation" until 11:59 p.m. on Monday, July 20, 2026.
"The purpose of this administrative injunction is to give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the emergency motion for an injunction pending appeal and should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion," the one-page per curiam order reads.
Effectively, the court has given itself more time to sort through what, if anything, will be done in response to Friedrich's ruling.
The panel deciding whether to take up Biden's appeal is composed of Chief Circuit Judge Sri Srinivasan, a Barack Obama appointee, Circuit Judge Gregory G. Katsas, a Trump appointee, and Circuit Judge Florence Y. Pan, a Biden appointee.