President Joe Biden has asserted executive privilege to block House Republicans from obtaining the audio recording of his interview with special counsel Robert Hur, whose investigation of the president's handling of classified documents led to a report that has fueled GOP attacks on Biden's fitness for office.
“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 Reps. James Comer and Jim Jordan on Thursday. "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.”
The House Judiciary and the Oversight and Accountability committees, led by Jordan and Comer respectively, had been preparing to bring contempt of Congress charges against Attorney General Merrick Garland for declining to comply with a subpoena for the interview tapes.
Biden's assertion of executive privilege effectively protects Garland from prosecution. Assistant Attorney General Carlos Felipe Uriarte told Comer and Jordan in a letter that the Justice Department had "made substantial efforts" to accommodate their interest in Hur's investigation.
"We have repeatedly made clear that disclosure of the subpoenaed audio recordings would damage future law enforcement efforts and that the Committees’ continued demands raise serious separation of powers concerns," Uriarte wrote.
NBC News and other news organizations have also brought suit under the Freedom of Information Act for the release of this audio, arguing that it is a public record and the White House has no grounds to withhold it.
Hur declined to bring charges against the president in February but said in his report that Biden's handling of classified documents had "serious risks to national security." Hur also made several negative references to Biden's memory in the report, noting that if the case had gone to a jury trial, Biden could present himself as a "sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory" to jurors as he did to investigators.