Biden asserts executive privilege for audio of Hur interview
President Joe Biden has asserted executive privilege to deny House Republicans access to recordings of his interview with a special counsel investigating his handling of government documents, Justice Department officials and the White House counsel said Thursday.
The move is intended to shield Attorney General Merrick Garland from prosecution if House Republicans succeed in their effort to hold him in contempt for refusing to turn over audio of Biden’s conversations with special counsel Robert Hur.
The move is certain to draw the ire of former President Donald Trump and his allies, but it is in keeping with the practice of his administration and that of his predecessor, President Barack Obama. The Justice Department cited executive privilege in opting not to pursue charges against two of Garland’s predecessors when they were held in
contempt: Eric Holder, a Democrat, in 2012 and William Barr, a Republican, in 2020.
“It is the long-standing 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,” Carlos F. Uriarte, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, wrote in a letter to Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, who
leads the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., who leads the Oversight Committee.
Uriarte urged the committees to withdraw their contempt resolutions, citing the decision by the House members to forgo contempt proceedings in 2008 when President George W. Bush asserted executive privilege after his vice president, Dick Cheney, was subpoenaed.
“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,” White House counsel Ed Siskel wrote in a letter to Jordan and Comer on Thursday, referring to Trump’s efforts to pressure department officials when he was president.
“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,” he added.
Garland wrote in a letter to the president that Hur’s interviews with the president and his ghost writer “fall within the scope of executive privilege.”
Handing them over “would raise an unacceptable risk” of undermining “similar high-profile criminal investigations – in particular, investigations where the voluntary cooperation of White House officials is exceedingly important,” he said.
The move came hours before the Judiciary and Oversight committees planned to hold sessions on Garland after he rejected their subpoenas for the recordings.
The contempt resolution would have to go to the full House for a vote. Approval is not certain, given Republicans’ narrow majority and intraparty divisions, congressional aides said.