The attorney general has failed to provide House Republicans with audio tapes of the president’s interviews with special counsel Hur.
WASHINGTON—The House Rules Committee on June 11 advanced a resolution to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress over his failure to comply with a subpoena to hand over audio tapes of President Joe Biden’s two-day interview with special counsel Robert Hur.
The measure was advanced on a party-line vote. A House floor vote on the resolution is expected on June 12, according to a spokesperson for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).
It will first head for a procedural rules vote to open up debate on the resolution, and if this clears, a final vote will be held.
The GOP can only lose two votes with its razor-slim majority, but should the measure pass, a criminal referral would be sent to the Justice Department, which is unlikely to act on it. At that point, the matter could end up in the courts.
Mr. Hur, who was probing President Biden’s handling of classified documents, declined to recommend charges. One of the reasons cited in his report was the observation that President Biden would present to a jury as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
This finding sparked intense scrutiny over the president’s mental acuity—accusations forcefully rejected by President Biden and the White House.
While the Justice Department has turned over transcripts and notes of the interview, House Republicans have maintained they need the tapes to verify the accuracy of the transcript and to confirm that Mr. Hur’s observation was justified.
President Biden invoked executive privilege over the tapes, giving the attorney general a legal defense for his noncompliance.
“The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal—to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes,” Ed Siskel, President Biden’s counsel, wrote to House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) in a May 16 letter.
For some Republicans though, this invocation of executive privilege only heightened suspicions about the recordings.
By Jackson Richman and Samantha Flom
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