President Joe Biden has dropped a lawsuit aimed at preventing the release of audio recordings and transcripts from interviews conducted by his memoir ghostwriter. The legal action was voluntarily dismissed by Biden's attorneys on Friday, just days after a divided appeals court panel rejected his bid to keep the material private.
The decision effectively paves the way for a Republican-led congressional committee to obtain the recordings and transcripts. Biden's legal team filed a notice of voluntary dismissal less than a week after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a 2-1 ruling against him. The panel had initially suspended its decision until August 3 to allow Biden more time to consider further legal options, such as petitioning the Supreme Court or seeking a rehearing by the full circuit court.
In her dissenting opinion, Circuit Judge Florence Pan argued that Biden had demonstrated a "substantial privacy interest" in withholding the material. The appeals court panel included Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Gregory Katsas. Pan was appointed by Biden, Srinivasan by former President Barack Obama, and Katsas by former President Donald Trump.
The interviews in question were conducted in 2016 and 2017 by Mark Zwonitzer, who collaborated with Biden on his memoirs "Promises to Keep" (2007) and "Promise Me, Dad" (2017). Biden's lawyers have maintained that these conversations were personal and candid, intended to remain private.
The recordings came into the possession of special counsel Robert Hur during his investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents from his time as a senator and vice president. Following Hur's decision not to file charges, Republican members of Congress sought access to the interview material.
Biden initially filed a lawsuit, seeking an injunction to prevent the Justice Department, under the Trump administration, from releasing the recordings to Congress and the conservative Heritage Foundation. A federal judge, U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, had previously ruled in June that the public interest in disclosing the material outweighed Biden's privacy rights.