President Joe Biden asserted executive privilege over the audio and video recordings during his interviews with Special Counsel Robert Hur.
The privilege includes interviews between Biden and ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer.
House Republicans threatened to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress if he doesn’t hand over the recordings.
Associate Attorney General Carlos Uriarte alerted Reps. Jim Jordan and James Comer, chairmen of the Committee on the Judiciary and Committee on Oversight and Accountability: “I write to inform you that the President has asserted executive privilege over the requested audio recordings and is making a protective assertion of privilege over any remaining materials responsive to the subpoenas that have not already been produced.”
Hur investigated Biden’s handling of classified documents when he departed as vice president in 2012.
Hur interviewed Biden for five hours in 2023. He didn’t recommend filing charges against Biden, but described him as “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The comments set off a wave of criticism and concern.
House Republicans subpoenaed the recordings in April. The department said it would not hand them over.
CNN (yes, CNN!), Judicial Watch, and the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project filed FOIA requests for the recordings.
“It is the longstanding position of the executive branch held by administrations of both parties that an official who asserts the President’s claim of executive privilege cannot be prosecuted for criminal contempt of Congress,” added Uriate.
Garland told Biden executive privilege applied to all recordings, including those with Zwonitzer: “The audio recordings of your interview and Mr. Zwonitzer’s interview fall within the scope of executive privilege. Production of these recordings to the Committees would raise an unacceptable risk of undermining the Department’s ability to conduct similar high-profile criminal investigations–in particular, investigations where the voluntary cooperation of White House officials is exceedingly important.”
Hur and his team released transcripts of the interviews. Why keep the recordings secret, especially since Biden claimed Hur “mischaracterized the interviews.”
White House Counsel Ed Siskel told House Republicans: “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. Demanding such sensitive and constitutionally-protected law enforcement materials from the Executive Branch because you want to manipulate them for potential political gain is inappropriate.”
Would Siskel tell CNN the same thing?
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