The Heritage Foundation believes that the effort to force the release of the crucial recording of President Joe Biden‘s interview with special counsel Robert Hur will be successful — even if the tape doesn’t come to them directly.

Heritage is part of a lawsuit that includes Judicial Watch and a CNN-led media coalition seeking to get the audio of Biden’s interviews with special counsel Robert Hur.

“I expect the tape is coming out one way or the other, and that will be because of this lawsuit,” Heritage Oversight Project Executive Director Mike Howell told reporters on a conference call Wednesday afternoon. “But the Biden administration would have some flexibility as to how they, politically, wanted to play that.”

Specifically, Howell thinks that if the Biden White House senses it’s going to lose the lawsuit, it will leak the tape to a media “ally” to get preferential coverage.

Hur was assigned by the Justice Department to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents, and while he did not charge the president, his report still rocked the political world by concluding Biden would present to a jury as an “elderly man with with a poor memory.”

That conclusion was based on Hur’s interviews with the president, during which Biden struggled to remember details like what year his son died and what year he stopped being vice president.

Only a written transcript of those interviews has been released, with Biden claiming executive privilege over the audio. That has led to furious debate on Capitol Hill and to the Heritage lawsuit.

“The transcript only has the words in it. It doesn’t have the ‘uhs’ and ‘ums,’” Heritage attorney Sam Dewey said on the call. “You as reporters know those types of pauses can often indicate someone’s thinking.”

The Biden administration has pushed back forcefully against the notion that it’s trying to hide anything, with White House counsel spokesman Ian Sams reiterating over the weekend that “the transcripts accurately reflect the words spoken on the audio.”

Dewey argues that if the transcript is accurate, then the tape should be released.

“They won’t let the American people judge the matter for themselves,” he said. “Why is that?”

The matter also came up during a House committee’s five-hour grilling of Attorney General Merrick Garland on Tuesday.

“The Supreme Court has said that in order to protect the separation of powers under the Constitution, the Congress has to have a legitimate legislative purpose for the things that it’s requesting,” Garland told Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) at the end of his testimony.

“I understand why you’d rather see the audio, hear the audio, than read the transcript,” he continued. “But I still do not understand a legislative purpose. I can’t see how listening to the audio will make any difference with respect to any legislation you have in mind.”

Republicans have not bought that explanation, while Democrats argue that Republicans only want the tapes to try and embarrass the president.

Dewey said the Department of Justice asked for an “absurd schedule” to hear the Heritage lawsuit, one that would likely push release of the audio past November’s election, but the judge has agreed to more expedited hearings.

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Heritage and its allies have a filing due on June 21, the government will respond 21 days later, and Heritage can reply to that after another 14 days, which would be July 29.

“We would expect the judge to hear argument and issue a decision fairly promptly thereafter,” he said.