BREAKING: Joe Biden’s Attorneys Are Being Accused of…

Former President Joe Biden is preparing to seek a federal court order blocking the Trump administration from releasing approximately 70 hours of audio recordings that captured him reading classified notebook passages to his ghostwriter during sessions in 2017, according to court documents filed May 8, 2026, that confirmed his legal team’s intent to intervene in an ongoing Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking access to the material.

The recordings were obtained by Special Counsel Robert Hur’s classified documents investigation and formed a central evidentiary foundation for Hur’s conclusions that Biden had read classified information nearly verbatim to ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer on at least three separate occasions.

The Department of Justice has stated it intends to release the redacted transcripts and audio to Congress and to the Heritage Foundation, which sued for the records under FOIA. Biden has stated through counsel that he intends to prevent those disclosures.

The court filing that disclosed Biden’s intent was a joint status report submitted by DOJ Assistant Attorney General Civil Division Brett Shumate and attorneys representing the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. Shumate wrote that Biden, through counsel, had advised the Department that he intends to seek to intervene to prevent any such disclosures of the written transcript and audio recordings.

The DOJ stated it does not oppose Biden’s intervention, meaning the government will not fight his attempt to block the release in court. The Heritage Foundation stated directly that it will oppose Biden’s intervention, characterizing his late entry into the case as arriving well over a year after the FOIA lawsuit was filed.

The recordings at the center of the dispute document conversations between Biden and Mark Zwonitzer, who collaborated with him on the 2017 memoir Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose. Hur’s investigation obtained the recordings after investigators discovered that Zwonitzer had moved the audio files into his computer’s recycle bin after learning that a special counsel had been appointed. Investigators recovered the recordings digitally.

Zwonitzer was subsequently granted immunity by prosecutors in exchange for his cooperation. Hur’s team considered charging Zwonitzer with obstruction of justice but ultimately declined to do so for lack of sufficient evidence of criminal intent.

Hur’s final report described what the recordings contained in significant detail. He concluded that Biden read journal entries about classified information nearly verbatim at least three times during the recorded sessions. The report specifically noted an instance in which Biden told Zwonitzer: “I just found all the classified stuff downstairs.”

Hur wrote that Biden’s memory was significantly limited both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017 and in his interview with the special counsel’s office in 2023.

Hur ultimately declined to prosecute Biden, citing in part the difficulty of proving willfulness beyond a reasonable doubt given the documented memory limitations. Biden has consistently denied sharing classified information during the ghostwriter sessions.

Heritage Foundation Oversight Project Director Mike Howell, who filed the original FOIA lawsuit for the tapes, responded to Biden’s blocking effort with pointed criticism. “These tapes will further prove the massive lie regarding Biden’s fitness for office and the fact Biden revealed classified information,” Howell said.

“The shenanigans aren’t over: At the last possible second, and after every delay tactic possible, the autopen is objecting to the American People receiving transparency.” Howell has consistently argued that the tapes belong to the American public and that Biden’s late-stage legal intervention is an attempt to suppress damaging evidence that should have been the subject of public scrutiny long ago.

Shumate’s filing on behalf of the Trump DOJ was direct about the government’s position on the public interest question. “The public deserves to hear the tapes and read the transcripts as redacted by President Donald J. Trump’s Department of Justice,” he wrote.

The redactions the DOJ proposes would protect privacy interests and ensure that no underlying classified information itself is disclosed through the release. The DOJ’s position is that the redacted audio and transcripts can be made public in a form that protects genuinely sensitive material while making available the portions of the recordings that document Biden’s handling of classified information during the ghostwriter sessions.

Biden’s legal team has not yet publicly specified the precise legal arguments it intends to advance in court. Attorneys are reportedly considering arguing that the recordings constitute personal records rather than federal government records and that their release would invade Biden’s privacy.

The personal records argument faces a significant threshold challenge given the chain of federal involvement through which the recordings came to be in federal custody: the recordings were obtained pursuant to a federal criminal investigation, recovered from a ghostwriter who attempted to delete them after a special counsel’s appointment, and produced in the context of an investigation into the handling of classified government documents.

Biden’s spokesperson TJ Ducklo framed the disclosure effort as politically motivated rather than a genuine transparency exercise. “What’s happening now isn’t about transparency. It’s about politics,” Ducklo said.

He also called on the administration to release the second volume of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on Trump’s own alleged mishandling of classified documents as a condition of genuine transparency.

The argument that two separate accountability processes should be conditioned on each other is one that legal and government accountability experts have generally rejected as contrary to the principle that transparency applies consistently across political figures regardless of party.

The timeline of Biden’s legal intervention has drawn direct criticism from Heritage. The FOIA lawsuit was filed in 2024. The case proceeded through more than a year of litigation during which Biden’s legal team did not seek to intervene. The intervention notice came only after the DOJ announced in the May 8 joint status report that it intended to release the material.

Heritage described Biden as having waited well over a year to act, a delay that Heritage argued reflects a deliberate strategy of exhausting every other delay mechanism before resorting to direct court intervention as a last resort.

The House Judiciary Committee, whose chairman requested the recordings from the DOJ, is one of the parties to whom the government intends to make the material available.

Congressional oversight of the classified documents investigation and its findings is a legitimate legislative function, and the recordings that formed the evidentiary foundation of Hur’s conclusions are directly relevant to that oversight function.

The committee’s ability to conduct thorough oversight of the special counsel’s investigation and its findings is directly affected by its access to the underlying evidence that produced those findings.

The DOJ established a May 12 deadline for Biden to file formal legal action. If he files by that deadline, the department has agreed to hold off on disclosing the material until June 15, providing time for the court to consider his intervention request. If Biden does not file by May 12, the DOJ has stated it will proceed with disclosure on a shorter timeline.

Biden’s spokesperson confirmed Sunday that he intends to fight the release, making the May 12 court filing likely. The litigation that follows will center on questions of whether former presidents retain personal privacy rights over recordings obtained in federal criminal investigations and whether those rights override FOIA obligations.

The classified documents investigation that Hur conducted followed the discovery of classified materials from Biden’s vice-presidential tenure at the Penn Biden Center in Washington and at his Delaware home. Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Hur as special counsel in January 2023 after those discoveries became public.

The investigation, which ran for over a year, examined Biden’s handling of those materials and concluded with Hur’s February 2024 report, which cleared Biden of criminal charges while describing conduct that represented improper retention and disclosure of classified information.

The political context of the recording dispute is inseparable from the 2024 presidential election cycle, during which Hur’s report and its description of Biden’s documented memory limitations contributed to the sustained public concern about his fitness for office that ultimately produced his July 2024 withdrawal from the race.

The recordings, which Hur described as documenting both the improper sharing of classified information and the extent of Biden’s memory limitations during the 2017 sessions, are the primary source document for those conclusions. Biden’s team has consistently sought to minimize the report’s findings and contested the characterization of his memory limitations as clinical rather than incidental.

The American public’s interest in the recordings is substantial and documented. The Heritage Foundation’s FOIA lawsuit reflects the formal legal mechanism through which that public interest has been pursued. Congressional oversight through the House Judiciary Committee represents the legislative mechanism.

The DOJ’s stated intention to release the redacted material reflects the executive branch’s assessment that the public interest in transparency outweighs any countervailing interest in maintaining the recordings’ confidentiality. Biden’s court intervention will ask a federal judge to reach the opposite conclusion.

The recordings exist. The DOJ has them. They were recovered from a ghostwriter’s digital recycle bin. They document conversations in which, according to a special counsel’s findings, a former vice president and future president of the United States read classified notebook passages to a private citizen working on a memoir. The American people have not heard them. They may hear them before June 15, or they may wait longer if Biden’s court intervention succeeds.

Either way, the accountability process that the Heritage Foundation’s FOIA lawsuit initiated and the Trump DOJ is now advancing will continue until the legal questions are resolved and the public record reflects the full scope of what the recordings contain.