A federal appeals court on Friday temporarily blocked the Department of Justice from turning over roughly 70 hours of audio from former President Joe Biden's interviews with his ghostwriter, giving Biden a short reprieve while the D.C. Circuit weighs his emergency bid to keep the recordings sealed.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, made up of Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judges Gregory Katsas and Florence Pan, issued an administrative injunction barring the Justice Department from releasing the recordings to the Heritage Foundation and its former Oversight Project director, Mike Howell, until 11:59 p.m. July 20.

The panel said the pause is meant only to preserve the status quo while it weighs Biden's motion for a longer injunction pending appeal, and CBS News reported that the brief unsigned order stressed it "should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits."

The order freezes a June ruling by U.S. District Judge Dabney Friedrich, who rejected Biden's effort to shield the tapes under the Freedom of Information Act.

Weighing FOIA's disclosure presumption against Biden's asserted privacy interest, Friedrich found that after Justice Department redactions, the recordings "contain no information about Biden's family or other private persons," and concluded that the public's interest in the material outweighed what she described as Biden's diminished privacy interest.

The audio dates to 2016 and 2017, when Biden sat for interviews with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer for his memoir "Promise Me, Dad."

The Department of Justice later obtained the tapes during former special counsel Robert Hur's investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents after his vice presidency.

Hur's February 2024 report found that Biden had willfully retained and disclosed classified material, including by reading it aloud to Zwonitzer, but declined to bring charges, concluding a jury would likely see Biden as "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."

The Heritage Foundation sought the tapes through a 2024 FOIA request.

The Biden-era DOJ refused. The Trump administration reversed course this year, prompting Biden to intervene and sue to block disclosure on the theory that the recordings captured private conversations in his home.

"We are monitoring the situation and, as always, will do whatever is in the best interest of getting these tapes out to the American people as fast as possible," Howell told the Examiner.

The D.C. Circuit is expected to rule before July 20 on whether Biden is entitled to a longer injunction while his appeal proceeds.

As of Friday, the administrative pause remains in effect.