President Joe Biden (left) pictured on May 12, 2024 in Delaware (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta), Attorney General Merrick Garland (right) speaks on May 13, 2024, as House Republicans are set to advance contempt of Congress charges against Garland for his refusal to turn over unredacted audio of a special counsel interview with President Joe Biden. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana, File)
As Freedom of Information Act litigation by conservative groups and mainstream media organizations to obtain audiotapes of special counsel Robert Hur’s interview of President Joe Biden carries on, House Judiciary Committee Republicans have separately filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to order U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to comply with a congressional subpoena he was held in contempt for defying.
The court docket reviewed by Law&Crime shows that the lawsuit, filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, was assigned Tuesday to U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, a jurist remembered for presiding over the trial of Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone, the sentencing of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and a long-running lawsuit stemming from former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s recommendation that then President Barack Obama assert executive privilege over Operation Fast and Furious documents.
When Hur released his report on the Biden classified documents investigation, noting that DOJ policy rules out charges against a sitting president, the special counsel said even though there was evidence Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified materials” after his vice presidency, a jury wouldn’t want to convict the president, whom he called a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
The special counsel also said there was a marked difference between the alleged facts in the Biden case and those in former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago prosecution.
“Unlike the evidence involving Mr. Biden, the allegations set forth in the indictment of Mr. Trump, if proven, would present serious aggravating facts,” the Hur report said. “Most notably, after being given multiple chances to return classified documents and avoid prosecution, Mr. Trump allegedly did the opposite.”
As House Republicans demanded the audiotapes, the White House responded by saying Hur’s report and the publicized transcripts of the president’s interview should be enough.
Backing Biden’s invocation of executive privilege at Garland’s request in court, the DOJ argued that forcing the release of the audio “would threaten critical law enforcement interests by chilling the potential cooperation of witnesses in current and future sensitive investigations,” implicate the “privacy interests” of a non-charged individual, and open the door for “malicious” actors to distort the audio with “deep fakes.”
House Republicans, like other litigants, are now making the argument that hearing the audiotapes is the only way to evaluate Hur’s conclusions about Biden’s “demeanor.” They say that a “frivolous assertion of executive privilege” should not get in the way.
“In sum, to fairly evaluate the Special Counsel’s recommendations, the Committee has concluded that it must have access to the audio recording of the President’s interview with the Special Counsel. That decision — which is the Committee’s to make, not DOJ’s — is reasonable because the Special Counsel relied on verbal (tone) and non-verbal (pace) nuances that are not captured by the cold transcript,” the lawsuit said. “The Committee is simply seeking access to that same information.”
But the plaintiffs go a step further by also claiming to have legitimate legislative powers and purposes: impeachment and potentially reforming the DOJ’s “use of special counsels.”
“The Committee is considering whether legislative reforms of DOJ and its use of special counsels are necessary. The Committee’s investigation into the Special Counsel’s recommendations here will help it make that decision,” the lawsuit claimed. “If the Committee concludes that the Special Counsel’s investigation into the sitting President did not deliver impartial justice, it may very well determine that legislative reforms are necessary to advance in the future both actual justice and the appearance of justice.”
Read the lawsuit here.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
