According to recent reports, Republicans in the House Judiciary Committee are planning to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to provide the audio recording of Joe Biden’s interviews with Special Counsel Robert Hur.
Per sources familiar with the matter, GOP members on the committee are expected to hold a meeting to review a contempt report and vote on whether to proceed with the move next week. Republicans have been fighting for months to obtain the recordings from the special counsel investigation.
However, the Department of Justice has fought back against the committee’s efforts to obtain the audio files. “It seems that the more information you receive, the less satisfied you are, and the less justification you have for contempt, the more you rush towards it,” stated Carlos Uriarte, head of legislative affairs for the Justice Department.
However, House Republicans have defended their initiative to receive the recordings as they could provide additional evidence on the president’s cognitive state. Such substantiation could further corroborate speculation about whether Biden is fit to serve as president.
“The Department’s unsupported speculation about the Committees’ motives in insisting that you produce the audio recordings has no bearing on your legal obligation to produce the subpoenaed materials,” the GOP members wrote last month.
Special Counsel Robert Hur was charged with investigating Joe Biden’s alleged mishandling of classified documents. Hur’s conclusion stated in part that criminal charges should not be brought against President Biden because of his elderly age and apparent complications surrounding his memory.
According to Hur, “We have also considered that, at trial, Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory . . . It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him—by then a former president well into his eighties of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
The full transcript provides even greater insight into Biden’s struggles with his memory. Part of it read, “In his interview with our office, Mr. Biden’s memory was worse. He did not remember when he was vice president, forgetting on the first day of the interview when his term ended (“if it was 2013 – when did I stop being Vice President?”), and forgetting on the second day of the interview when his term began (“in 2009, am I still Vice President?”), He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died. And his memory appeared hazy when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him. Among other things, he mistakenly said he “had a real difference” of opinion with General Karl Eikenberry, when, in fact, Eikenberry was an ally whom Mr. Biden cited approvingly in his Thanksgiving memo to President Obama. In a case where the government must prove that Mr. Biden knew he had possession of the classified Afghanistan documents after the vice presidency and chose to keep those documents, knowing he was violating the law, we expect that at trial, his attorneys would emphasize these limitations in his recall.”
Featured image credit: Tom Williams (CQ Roll Call), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Merrick_Garland_August_2023_press_conference.jpg
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