DC Circuit Just Rejected Joe Biden’s Last Ditch Effort To Bury His Own Ghostwriter Tapes

Robert Hur once called Joe Biden an "elderly man with a poor memory."

Now a federal appeals court just ordered the tapes behind that report released.

Biden fought to keep America from hearing those recordings and he just lost.

Court Says The Public Wins This One

A divided panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handed down a 2 to 1 ruling late Monday.

The judges rejected Biden's request to block release of 70 hours of audio and transcripts from his 2016 and 2017 interviews with memoir ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer.

The majority didn't mince words.

They wrote that any remaining privacy concern from the redacted materials "likely does not outweigh the public interest in disclosure."

Translation – the tapes are coming out, and Biden's lawyers just ran out of runway.

The court gave Biden until Aug 3 before the order kicks in, in case he wants to try one more appeal.

A Trump Appointed Judge Started This Avalanche

This didn't start with the appeals court.

U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, nominated by President Trump, ruled back in June that the public's interest in the tapes outweighed whatever privacy Biden claimed.

Biden appealed anyway, hoping a higher court would bail him out.

Instead he drew a panel that agreed with Friedrich by a two to one margin.

Only Judge Florence Pan, nominated by Biden himself, sided with the former president in dissent.

Even that detail tells you something about how thin Biden's legal ground really was.

Heritage Foundation Forced The Issue

The tapes exist because of special counsel Robert Hur's investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents from his time as a senator and as Obama's vice president.

Hur declined to charge Biden, but only because he concluded a jury would see him as a sympathetic elderly man who couldn't remember basic facts about his own life.

Congressional Republicans demanded the underlying tapes after that report landed, and the Heritage Foundation filed a Freedom of Information Act request to pry them loose.

Mike Howell, who runs Heritage's Oversight Project, said the recordings will "further prove the massive lie regarding Biden's fitness for office."

The Justice Department under Garland released transcripts back in 2024 but sat on the actual audio, citing fears the recordings could be manipulated into deepfakes.

Biden then sued to keep even the redacted tapes locked away for good.

That lawsuit is the one the D.C. Circuit just gutted.

The Autopen Question Won't Go Away

This ruling lands in the middle of a much bigger fight over who actually ran the country during Biden's final years in office.

Back in February 2024, 83 House Republicans led by Dr. Ronny Jackson demanded Biden take a cognitive test after Hur's report went public.

Senate investigator Ron Johnson has demanded the National Archives hand over every record touching Biden's mental and physical health.

House Oversight Chairman James Comer's committee says staffers admitted under questioning that some of them didn't even know who was authorizing the autopen signatures on Biden's pardons and executive actions.

Every one of those signatures just became worth a second look.

Seventy hours of Biden talking, unscripted, in his own home in 2016 and 2017 is exactly the kind of raw material that could settle how far back the decline really goes.

That's the proof Comer's committee has been chasing for over a year.

What The August 3rd Deadline Actually Means

Biden's team can still ask the full D.C. Circuit or the Supreme Court to step in before then.

But they've now lost in front of a Trump appointed district judge and a divided appeals panel that includes an Obama appointee siding against them.

The tapes were recorded when Biden was still a private citizen weighing a run for president, sitting across from a ghostwriter he trusted to tell his story straight.

Soon the American people may get to hear that story for themselves, in his own voice, without the staff who spent years managing what the country was allowed to see.

Sources:

• Simon Kent, "Appeals Court Rejects Biden Effort to Shield Ghostwriter Interview Tapes," Breitbart News, July 21, 2026.
• "Biden Loses Bid To Bury Ghostwriter Tapes That Could Shed Light On Classified Docs, Cognitive Decline," The Daily Caller, July 21, 2026.
• "Biden expected to oppose release of Robert Hur tapes in Heritage Foundation lawsuit," Washington Examiner, May 2026.
• Brooke Singman, "Johnson demands NARA turn over records related to Biden's mental 'decline' amid Senate probe of 'cover-up,'" Fox News, July 17, 2025.
• "House Republicans push Biden to take cognitive test after Hur report: 'Obvious mental decline,'" Fox News, February 16, 2024.
• House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, "The Biden Autopen Presidency," oversight.house.gov, 2026.