Overview
- A federal judge denied President Biden’s request for a preliminary injunction Friday, allowing the Justice Department to turn over redacted audio recordings and transcripts from his conversations with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer.
- The tapes and transcripts were gathered by special counsel Robert Hur during his probe into retained classified documents and were treated as investigative material in that inquiry.
- The Justice Department originally withheld the materials under FOIA exemptions, then reversed course after congressional requests and authorization from President Donald Trump’s DOJ, a sequence that led congressional Republicans to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt.
- Judge Dabney Friedrich concluded the proposed redactions remove mentions of highly sensitive topics such as illness or death and ruled the public interest outweighs Biden’s privacy claim, and Biden’s team said they will appeal or seek to delay release.
- The records will go to the Heritage Foundation requester and the House Judiciary Committee, and the extent of redactions will determine how much substantive content becomes public while coverage of the tapes varies sharply across partisan outlets.