Former President Joe Biden will not appeal a court ruling allowing the Trump Justice Department to release transcripts and tape recordings of the Biden's conversations with his ghostwriter.Biden's lawyers filed a notice of voluntary dismissal Friday in a related case that has the effect of ending the legal battle. The result is a win for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that sued in order to publicize the records. The tapes date back to 2017, after Biden left office as vice president and sat for several hours of interviews with the writer collaborating on his memoir, Promise Me, Dad. In 2022, when Biden was president, he informed the Justice Department that he had discovered classified documents at his Wilmington, Del., home.The Department then began an investigation into his handling of classified document; it collected the tapes as a part of that investigation.
In 2024, Robert Hur, a special prosecutor appointed by the Justice Department concluded that although Biden brought some classified documents to his home, that criminal charges were not warranted.As the special prosecutor's report put it, after reviewing classified documents every day for eight years as Vice President, Biden finding documents at his home "could have been an unremarkable and forgettable event."The report, however, sparked controversy because it described Biden as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." And according to the 2024 report, the tapes of Biden's conversations with his ghostwriter were "painfully slow, with Mr.
Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries."Conservative activists seeking the tapes hope that the records will validate concerns about Biden's mental acuity before he was elected president. "What you're going to hear on the tapes … is the state of Joe Biden years before he ran for president, when a special prosecutor said he has memory issues," said Jeffrey C...