A federal judge just blew through Joe Biden's last-ditch legal wall hiding the audio recordings at the center of the Special Counsel Robert Hur investigation — and the American public is one step closer to hearing for themselves exactly what the establishment fought so hard to bury.
Why it matters: These recordings are the raw evidence behind Hur's explosive conclusion that a jury would likely view Biden as a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory." The Biden Justice Department stonewalled Congress for months to keep this material under wraps — even letting Attorney General Merrick Garland take a contempt of Congress citation rather than hand it over. Now a judge has ruled the public's right to know trumps Biden's privacy claims, and the cover-up is cracking.
U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich on Friday denied Biden's request for a preliminary injunction, ruling his legal team had little chance of succeeding on the merits. The recordings stem from Biden's 2017 conversations with his biographer, Mark Zwonitzer, which Hur obtained during his probe into Biden's retention of classified documents from his Senate and vice-presidential years.
Biden's lawyers intervened under the Administrative Procedure Act, arguing the DOJ's decision to release the materials after previously withholding them was arbitrary and unlawful. According to Breitbart, Friedrich dismantled that argument, finding the DOJ provided a reasonable explanation for changing its position and that the decision was not arbitrary. She also rejected Biden's claim that the disclosure was politically motivated, writing he had not made the "strong showing of bad faith" necessary to look beyond the agency's stated rationale.
Biden had objected to the release as an invasion of privacy, claiming the recordings included him discussing sensitive personal matters such as the death of his son Beau. Friedrich wasn't buying it. The redacted materials, she wrote, "contain no mention of highly sensitive topics like illness or death, nor do they mention any non-public persons, including members of Biden's family," according to the Los Angeles Times. The court found those redactions sufficiently protected Biden's privacy while still satisfying what it called a "significant public interest" in how the classified documents probe was handled.
The political trajectory here tells its own story. Biden's own DOJ originally withheld the files. Republicans in Congress demanded them after Hur declined to recommend charges — and when the Biden administration refused to turn them over, the House held Garland in contempt. The Heritage Foundation forced the issue through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Then Trump's DOJ reversed course and authorized release. Biden sued last month to stop it.
The Guardian and the Los Angeles Times both noted Friedrich was nominated by Trump in 2017 — framing that invites readers to discount the ruling as partisan. Neither outlet dwelled on the substance of her reasoning or the fact that the original stonewall came from Biden's own DOJ, which spent months defying congressional subpoenas before the contempt vote.
Biden's team has asked Friedrich to bar release of the material while they appeal. The DOJ did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The question now is whether Biden's lawyers can run out the clock on appeal — or whether Americans will finally get to hear, in the President's own voice, what Hur was describing when he declined to prosecute a man he characterized as cognitively diminished.
