WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden asserted executive privilege over audio of his interview with special counsel Robert Hur, who is at the center of a Republican effort to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, the Justice Department told lawmakers in a letter released publicly on Thursday.
This comes as the House Oversight and Accountability Committee and the Judiciary Committee are expected to hold a hearing to recommend that the full House refer Garland to the Justice Department on contempt charges over the department’s refusal to turn over the audio.
Garland informed Biden in a letter on Thursday that the audio falls within the scope of executive privilege. Garland told the Democratic chairman that “the needs of the committee are clearly insufficient to offset the deleterious effects that production of the recordings would have on the integrity and effectiveness of similar police investigations in the future.”
Deputy Attorney General Carlos Felipe Uriarte urged lawmakers not to pursue the contempt effort to avoid “unnecessary and unjustified conflicts.”
“It is a long-standing position of the executive branch, held by administrations of both parties, that an official who asserts the president’s claim to executive privilege cannot be held in contempt of Congress,” Uriarte wrote.
White House counsel Ed Siskel wrote in a separate, scathing letter to Congress on Thursday that lawmakers’ effort to obtain the recording was absent any legitimate purpose and lays out its likely goal — “to cut them out, distort them, them and use them for partisan purposes”. political purposes.”
The White House letter is a tacit admission that there are moments in Hur’s interview that she fears portray Biden in a negative light in an election year — and that could be exacerbated by the release, or selective release, of the audio.
The transcript of Hur’s interview showed Biden struggling to remember some dates and occasionally confusing details — something longtime aides say he has done for years, both in public and private — but otherwise showing deep recollection in other areas. Biden and his aides are particularly sensitive to questions about his age. At 81, he is the oldest president ever and is seeking another four-year term.
Hur, a former senior Justice Department official in the Trump administration, was named special counsel in January 2023 following the discovery of classified documents at multiple locations linked to Biden.
Hur’s report said many of the documents recovered at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, parts of Biden’s home in Delaware and his Senate papers at the University of Delaware were withheld in “error.”
But investigators found evidence of intentional retention and disclosure related to a subset of records found in Biden’s home in Wilmington, Delaware, including a garage, an office and a basement office.
The files refer to a troop surge in Afghanistan during the Obama administration, which Biden vigorously opposed. Biden kept records documenting his position, including a confidential letter to Obama during the 2009 Thanksgiving holiday. Some of this information was shared with a ghostwriter with whom she published memoirs in 2007 and 2017.
