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.
“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.
“President Biden is apparently afraid for the citizens of this country and everyone to hear those tapes,” Mr. Johnson said in May. “They obviously confirm what the special counsel has found, and would likely cause, I suppose, in his estimation, such alarm of the American people that the president is using all of his power to suppress their release.”
The Justice Department has argued that providing the tapes would deter future presidents from cooperating with similar investigations down the road.
The Justice Department also raised concerns that artificial intelligence could be used to create “deep fakes” of the audio to distort what President Biden actually said.
In an 18-page June 10 memo to Democrats, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, came to Mr. Garland’s defense.
“The audio recording of that interview will not in any way change the president’s words, nor will it miraculously reveal the evidence of impeachable conduct that committee Republicans have vainly sought in the 3.8 million pages of documents and 80 hours of testimony collected as part of their 17-month impeachment inquiry,” he wrote in the memo, which was obtained by The Epoch Times.
“These contempt proceedings are a transparent effort to find a scapegoat for the embarrassing failure of this sham impeachment effort,” he continued.
“We will not be intimidated by these attacks. But it is absurd and dangerous that public servants, many of whom risk their lives every day, are being threatened for simply doing their jobs and adhering to the principles that have long guided the Justice Department’s work,” Mr. Garland wrote.
