A federal judge ruled on Friday that the Department of Justice can hand over redacted versions of former President Joe Biden’s conversations with his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, to the conservative Heritage Foundation — and then issued a temporary stay to allow a potential appeal.
Biden had intervened in a lawsuit brought by the Heritage Foundation over a Freedom of Information Act request that sought records from former special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified materials after his time as vice president.
Hur, at the end of his probe, did not recommend charges against Biden, despite finding evidence that Biden “willfully retained” classified materials.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, in her ruling Friday, determined that the information is of high public interest and said that after reviewing the material herself, the DOJ’s redactions to the material undercut Biden’s claims that his privacy would be violated.
The judge wrote that “the privacy interests in this case — though substantial — are mitigated by the Department’s extensive redactions, as reviewed by the Court in camera.”
“As now redacted, the Zwonitzer materials contain no information about Biden’s family or other private persons,” the judge wrote.
In this Feb. 27, 2026, file photo, former President Joe Biden speaks to a crowd during a fundraising event with the South Carolina Democratic Party at the Columbia Museum of Art in Columbia, South Carolina.
Sean Rayford/Getty Images, FILE
In an order directly following her decision, she issued a temporary stay for a period of three weeks “to permit the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit an orderly period to consider whether to grant an injunction pending appeal.”
A spokesperson for former President Biden declined to comment to ABC News about either the ruling or the stay.
Separately, Biden also sued the department last month in an effort to block the release of recordings and transcripts from interviews he gave for his memoir that were central to Hur’s probe .
The audio recordings and transcripts stem from interviews Biden did with Zwonitzer for his 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose.”