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July 10, 2026 / 12:33 PM EDT
/ CBS News
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Washington — A federal appeals court temporarily blocked the Justice Department from turning over to a conservative think tank redacted transcripts and audio recordings of conversations former President Joe Biden had with his biographer roughly a decade ago.A panel of three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed to issue an administrative injunction that stops the release of the material to the Heritage Foundation for 10 days. The court said in a brief unsigned order that the purpose of its injunction, which expires at 11:59 p.m. on July 20, is to "give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the emergency motion for an injunction pending appeal and should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion."The recordings at issue in the legal fight date back to 2016 and 2017, when Biden sat down with his biographer, Mark Zwonitzer, for his memoir, "Promise Me, Dad." But they gained interest from the Heritage Foundation several years later following an investigation by former special counsel Robert Hur into Biden's handling of sensitive government records after his vice presidency, which ended in 2017. The former president was not charged with any crimes stemming from Hur's investigation.The special counsel's report, released in 2024, included passages that referenced Biden's conversations with Zwonitzer. The special counsel wrote the recordings showed the former president's "diminished faculties and faulty memory," and said his conversations with Zwonitzer were "painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries."Soon after Hur's report was released, the Heritage Foundation filed a public records request for material the special counsel relied on to write specific portions of the report, including the excerpts that referred to Zwonitzer's recorded conversations with Biden.The Justice Department initially withheld the audio tapes and most of the written transcripts, citing certain exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act. But once President Trump returned to the White House, the department said it intended to provide the material to Congress and the Heritage Foundation.
