Biden Interview Tapes Released to Congress Today

So here's the deal: those Biden interview tapes that Congress has been fighting over for years? Today, June 15, is the day the Justice Department said it would hand them over — unless a federal court steps in to stop it.

Let's rewind a bit so this makes sense. Back in 2023, former President Biden sat down with Special Counsel Robert Hur, who was investigating how Biden handled classified documents after leaving the vice presidency. Hur's probe ended with no criminal charges recommended because the evidence wasn't sufficient to support a conviction. But the fallout didn't stop there. Hur's 388-page report created a political firestorm by describing Biden as someone who could appear to a jury as "an elderly man with a poor memory."

Now there's a second set of tapes in the mix — and this is what's really at the center of today's release. At issue are audio recordings and transcripts of Biden's interviews at his home in 2016 and 2017 with Mark Zwonitzer, who worked with Biden on his two memoirs. One of those memoirs, "Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose," became the focus of a 2024 Freedom of Information Act request by the conservative Heritage Foundation, which later filed its own lawsuit to obtain the materials.

The 70 hours of partially redacted audio recordings in question were obtained by investigators during Special Counsel Robert Hur's 2023 probe into Biden's handling of classified documents. Hur eventually declined to bring charges against Biden. But now the Trump administration's DOJ has reversed course and agreed to hand them over.

On May 5, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General informed Biden's counsel that the department had made a final decision to release the materials, with limited redactions, to the Heritage Foundation and to Congress on June 15. That set off a last-ditch legal fight. Biden sued to block the House Judiciary Committee from obtaining audio recordings of conversations with his memoir's ghostwriter.

Biden argues the tapes contain personal discussions about his son Beau's death and deserve privacy protection. His lawyers argued that the disclosure would "constitute an unwarranted invasion of President Biden's privacy."

On the other side of this, GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, said he wants the tapes to "underscore what the Democrats were trying to hide just a few years ago."

Worth noting: this isn't entirely new ground. The House voted in 2024 to hold Biden's Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over audio from the Hur interview, and the transcripts of five hours of Biden interviews with federal prosecutors were released that same year. So some of this material is already public — just not in audio form, and not the ghostwriter tapes.

Biden spokesperson TJ Ducklo said the former president cooperated fully with Hur and provided the tapes of his conversations with Zwonitzer "on the condition that they would not be made public."

Why does this matter to you? If you care about presidential accountability or privacy rights, this case sits right at the intersection of both. It sets a precedent for how much a former president's private conversations — even ones that were never meant for public consumption — can be pulled into political disputes by a successor administration. The lawsuit pits a former U.S. president against his successor's administration in a way that's pretty much unprecedented. Whatever happens in court today, the political fallout is far from over.