Former President Joe Biden will not appeal a court ruling that lets the Trump Justice Department release recordings and written transcripts of his conversations with a ghostwriter, according to NPR on July 25, 2026. Biden's lawyers filed paperwork on Friday to drop the case, ending the legal fight over the tapes.

The recordings were made in 2016 and 2017, after Biden left his role as vice president. He sat for interviews with Mark Zwonitzer, who was helping write Biden's memoir called "Promise Me, Dad" (Baltimore Sun). In 2022, while serving as president, Biden told the Justice Department that classified documents had been found at his home in Wilmington, Delaware. The Justice Department collected the ghostwriter tapes as part of that investigation (NPR). On January 15, 2023, Biden, through his personal lawyers, offered and allowed a room-by-room search of the Wilmington home, according to a DOJ document of communications between the Special Counsel's Office and Biden's attorneys.

A prosecutor named Robert Hur concluded in 2024 that Biden should not face criminal charges for his handling of classified documents. The Hur report described Biden as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" and said the tapes were "painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events" (NPR).

A conservative group called the Heritage Foundation sued to get the tapes in April 2024. The Justice Department fought against releasing them for nearly two years, including during the first year of Trump's second term as president. In May 2026, the Trump Justice Department changed its position and said it planned to release both the written transcript and the audio recordings (NPR). Politico reported on May 10, 2026 that Biden's lawyers planned to go to court before a deadline that week to fight the release.

After the Justice Department changed course, Biden joined the Heritage Foundation lawsuit and also filed his own separate lawsuit to stop the release, arguing that his right to privacy outweighed the public's right to see the tapes (CBS News). A federal judge initially blocked the Justice Department from releasing the conversations (CBS News.

Two lower courts, including a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., disagreed with Biden's privacy argument. The appeals court issued its ruling on July 21, 2026 (New York Times). The court put its ruling on hold until August 3, 2026, to give Biden's legal team time to consider a further appeal (PBS NewsHour). Instead of taking the case to the Supreme Court, Biden's team filed the dismissal on July 25 (NPR).

A Justice Department office that provides legal advice to the president had previously weighed in on the issue. On May 15, 2024, that office issued a formal opinion on whether the recordings could be kept secret under a legal concept called executive privilege, which allows presidents to keep certain conversations confidential. The opinion was written by Assistant Attorney General Christopher C. Fonzone (DOJ OLC). That opinion, issued while Biden was president, had supported keeping the tapes private.

Jeffrey Clark, a Trump ally and vice president for litigation at the Oversight Project, told NPR that conservative organizations plan to immediately share the full tapes and transcripts once they get them (NPR). A source familiar with the 2017 recordings told NPR the tapes are "painfully boring" because Biden is going through documents one-by-one, reading them, and then discussing them (NPR).

The Justice Department had already made related materials public. The department posted the transcript of Zwonitzer's interview with investigators, conducted on July 31, 2023, on its website, and released a collection of communications between the Special Counsel's Office and Biden's attorneys in July 2024.

The broader context here is that a Justice Department under one president reversed the legal position taken by the Justice Department under the previous president, in a dispute over records involving that former president himself. The Biden Justice Department's opinion supporting keeping the Hur audio private has now been overridden by the Trump Justice Department's May 2026 decision to release them, and Biden's decision to drop the case removes the last legal option to prevent disclosure. With the court's hold expiring August 3, the recordings and transcripts can now be produced. Conservative groups have said they intend to release the full content immediately, which would make the audio of Biden's conversations public ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.