The Heritage Foundation has sought the release of recordings from 2016-17 between Joe Biden and his ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer. The recordings are redacted. The existence of those files came to light after prosecutor Robert Hur interviewed then-President Joe Biden over classified documents in 2023.
A federal appeals court just removed the last hurdle to the Heritage Foundation’s effort. Biden tried to block the Department of Justice from releasing the tapes but on Monday night, that appeal was denied in a 2-1 decision. “We conclude that Biden has not shown a likelihood that the requested materials must be withheld from disclosure,” said the appeals court.
Hur’s reports on the conversations with Zwonitzer revealed that Biden could not remember when he was vice president, under President Barack Obama, nor was he clear on when his son Beau Biden died from cancer.
The order reads “that the motion for an injunction pending appeal be denied. Appellant has not satisfied stringent requirements for an injunction pending appeal.” The court goes on to order that “this court’s administrative injunction entered July 10, 2026, is hereby extended to August 3, 2026 to allow Appellant, if he wishes, to seek further review.”
The Heritage Foundation filed a public records request for the recordings, not just the written report and transcript, of Biden’s interviews with Zwonitzer. In June 2024, it was revealed that Zwonitzer had deleted some of the recordings of interviews with Biden, motivated in part by the investigation into Hur’s conversations with Biden.
Hur documented a conversation Biden had with his ghostwriter Zwonitzer, saying “Biden’s memory also appeared to have significant limitations—both at the time he spoke to Zwonitzer in 2017, as evidenced by their recorded conversations, and today, as evidenced by his recorded interview in our office.” It was this passage that led the Heritage Foundation to seek out the Zwonitzer tapes.
The interviews between Hur and Biden, conducted in October 2023, were over whether or not Biden, prior to serving as president, had unlawfully retained classified materials during any of his previous roles in government, including as senator and vice president. Of particular note was a passage from a report Hur wrote on the interviews, which the DOJ would not hand over to Congress to assess Biden’s mental capability.
Hur was attempting to discover if Biden was guilty of the same infraction of absconding with classified documents for which his DOJ, under prosecutor Jack Smith, had prosecuted Donald Trump. The report from Hur said that Biden should not be prosecuted.
“We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” Hur’s report read. “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties—of a serious felony that requires a mental state of wilfulness.”
In other words, Hur said that Biden was too old and too dotty to be taken seriously by a jury or to be held accountable for alleged crimes. Photos had emerged showing boxes of classified documents housed in his garage next to his Corvette. Other boxes of documents were revealed to be scattered across a few different offices.
Biden would not become the Democrat nominee for president until 2020, entering office in January 2021, years after the state of his mental ability was already in question by those close to him. In June 2024, when he again faced Trump on the presidential debate stage, his mental capacity came quickly into question as he fumbled his words and seemed to not know what he was saying. “We finally beat Medicare,” he said, among other questionable gaffes.