Appeals court rejects Biden bid to block release of ghostwriter recordings used in special counsel probe

A federal appeals court just told Joe Biden he doesn't get to pick and choose which parts of his own record become public. The recordings and transcripts of his ghostwriter's interviews, the ones Robert Hur's team leaned on while building the classified documents case, are coming out. Biden's lawyers fought this for a reason, and it wasn't about protecting some innocent bystander's privacy.

Remember how this whole episode played out the first time around. Hur's report described an elderly man with a poor memory, couldn't recall when his own son died, couldn't place the years he served as vice president. The White House and its allies spent weeks insisting that characterization was unfair, political, overblown. Now we get to hear the actual tape instead of relying on someone's paraphrase of it. That should have happened months ago.

There's a pattern here worth naming plainly. When the material might embarrass a Democratic president, the instinct is always to litigate, delay, and hope the news cycle moves on before anyone has to answer for what's actually on the recording. Transparency was supposedly the whole selling point of this administration, and yet actual primary source material describing the president's mental state had to be dragged into daylight by a court, not offered up voluntarily.

None of this settles the underlying question of whether Biden was fit for the job at the time. But it does settle whether the public deserved to hear this for themselves rather than take anyone's word for it. They did. The court got it right.