A federal judge has rejected Joe Biden’s bid to keep the Justice Department from releasing recorded conversations with his biographer a decade ago that prosecutors used to conclude the former president improperly shared classified information with the author.

U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich ruled the public’s interest in the information outweighed Biden’s privacy rights in seeking a preliminary injunction to block the release of the transcripts to the conservative watchdog group The Oversight Project.

The judge noted she reviewed the transcripts of the conversations with author Mark Zwonitzer and found that the Justice Department had deleted all information about the Biden family and personal matters.

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

“As now redacted, the Zwonitzer materials contain no information about Biden’s family or other private persons. And while public figures maintain certain privacy rights, the Department did not abuse its discretion in finding that nothing in the remaining Zwonitzer materials is sensitive enough to outweigh the public’s unusually strong interest,” she added.

The judge, an appointee of President Donald Trump, gave Biden time, however, to lodge an appeal, delaying any release by at least three weeks.

Special Counsel Robert Hur obtained the recordings in 2023 as part of a probe that concluded Biden’s shared classified materials with Mark Zwonitzer in 2017. The prosecutor, however, declined to bring charges.