A federal judge on Friday cleared the way for the public release of redacted audio recordings and transcripts from former President Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur, denying Biden’s bid to block the disclosure.

U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich rejected Biden’s request for a preliminary injunction, ruling that his legal team had little chance of successfully stopping the Department of Justice.

The DOJ had originally withheld the sensitive files, which detail the investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents. However, prosecutors reversed course and now intend to hand redacted versions over to the House Judiciary Committee and the conservative Heritage Foundation, which forced the issue through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

Biden’s legal team had intervened in the case, arguing the DOJ’s decision to release the materials after previously withholding them was unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act.

Judge Friedrich dismantled that argument. In her ruling, she concluded that Biden failed to prove the DOJ abused its discretion when it decided that the public’s right to know trumped the former president’s privacy.

According to the court, the DOJ correctly determined that extensive redactions would sufficiently protect Biden’s personal privacy, while still satisfying what it called a “significant public interest” in how the classified documents probe was handled.

According to the ruling, the DOJ determined that the recordings and transcripts were important because Hur expressly relied on them in reaching conclusions discussed in his public report, including his decision not to prosecute Biden.

Friedrich found that the department had provided a reasonable explanation for changing its earlier position and that its decision was not arbitrary. The judge also rejected Biden’s argument that the disclosure decision was improperly motivated by politics, writing that he had not made the “strong showing of bad faith” necessary to look beyond the agency’s stated rationale.

While Friedrich acknowledged that disclosure could cause irreparable harm to Biden’s privacy interests, she concluded that Biden had failed to establish a likelihood of success on the merits. The court further found that the public interest favored disclosure, citing FOIA’s policy of broad access to government records.

“The harm to Biden’s diminished privacy interest is outweighed by the public’s interest in the Zwonitzer materials,” Friedrich wrote.

The ruling removes the immediate legal barrier to the DOJ’s planned release of the redacted recordings and transcripts.

The audio recordings stem from conversations between Biden and his biographer, Mark Zwonitzer, that were reviewed as part of Hur’s investigation into Biden’s retention of classified documents. In his February 2024 report, Hur declined to recommend charges against Biden but cited his memory and mental state as factors, writing that a jury would likely view Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”