House lawmakers will vote within days to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over the audio recording of special counsel Robert K. Hur’s interview with President Biden, in which the prosecutor said the 81-year-old president showed a weak memory.
The House Judiciary Committee plans a Thursday vote on the contempt charge, according to a draft report reviewed by The Washington Times.
Lawmakers on the GOP-led panel said Mr. Garland failed to comply with repeated requests for information and subsequent congressional subpoenas seeking evidence related to the case, most notably the recording of Mr. Hur’s interviews with Mr. Biden, which took place over two days last Oct. 8-9.
Mr. Hur, who has since resigned from the Justice Department, cited the audio recordings in his decision not to charge Mr. Biden over his mishandling of classified documents and said the president came across as “a sympathetic, well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.”
The contempt threat comes on the heels of a new Justice Department court filing aimed at defeating a lawsuit by CNN and two conservative groups seeking release of the recordings of Mr. Biden’s interviews with Mr. Hur.
Brian M. Boyton, principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Division, argued in a six-page federal court filing that the interview recordings are exempt from public record laws.
In rebuffing a similar request from the House GOP, Justice Department officials said in April that lawmakers “have not articulated a legitimate congressional need to obtain audio recordings from Mr. Hur’s investigation. ”
Department officials said releasing the audio recordings “would harm law enforcement and the evenhanded administration of justice” by hindering cooperation from witnesses in future cases.
Mr. Garland also refused to turn over to Congress the audio recording of Mr. Hur’s interview with Mark Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter for Mr. Biden’s 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.” Mr. Biden shared classified information with Mr. Zwonitzer, according to Mr. Hur’s report, and Mr. Zwonitzer deleted some of his audio recordings of his interviews with Mr. Biden when he learned of Mr. Hur’s appointment in the case.
Mr. Biden was paid $8 million for the book, which reached Number One on The New York Times bestseller list.
Mr. Hur testified in March that Mr. Biden revealed classified documents about the war in Afghanistan to Mr. Zwonitzer in February 2017 and “read classified information out loud” to him.
The author did not hold a security clearance.
Mr. Hur’s testimony undermines Mr. Biden‘s argument that he did not willfully take or share boxes of classified information found in his Washington, D.C. office and at his home in Wilmington, Delaware. Some of the material was left in a pile in his garage.
In the draft report, lawmakers made the case for holding Mr. Garland in contempt, arguing his refusal to share the Biden and Zwonitzer recordings and other documents is hindering the House Republican impeachment inquiry into the president.
“The department has invoked no constitutional or legal privilege to support withholding this material,” lawmakers wrote in the report.
The Justice Department released transcripts of the interviews with Mr. Biden and Mr. Zwonitzer, but they include redactions.
Lawmakers said the audio recordings would provide evidence not found in the transcript, including “important verbal context, such as tone or tenor, or nonverbal context, such as pauses or pace of delivery.”
The audio would help settle a conflict between Mr. Biden and Mr. Hur over the president’s mental acuity, they said.
Mr. Biden has angrily refuted Mr. Hur’s claim that he exhibited poor memory during the interviews.
“The transcripts provided to the committee are insufficient to arbitrate this dispute as to President Biden’s mental state, an issue which goes directly to his culpability and whether Special Counsel Hur appropriately pursued justice by declining to bring an indictment,” lawmakers wrote.
In addition to the audio recordings, House lawmakers are seeking copies of classified documents found in Mr. Biden’s possession that chronicle some of his interactions with the Ukrainian government while he was vice president.
One of the documents includes talking points for a Dec. 11, 2015, call with then-Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, and the second document is the transcript of the call between the two.
At the time, Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was earning a $1 million annual salary from Ukrainian gas company Burisma Holdings, and company executives were pressuring him to get help from Mr. Biden in shaking off a corruption probe.
Hunter Biden remained on the Burisma board until 2019.
“Given that Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine were still active when Joe Biden left the vice presidency, President Biden’s retention of these classified documents raises questions about whether he purposely took them when he left office in order to benefit his family,” GOP lawmakers wrote in the contempt report. “Doing so would be an abuse of his office of public trust.”
While the Justice Department rejected the GOP’s attempts to obtain the audio recordings, it allowed them to view the two documents related to the Ukraine call in a secure setting but would not provide copies.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on the upcoming contempt vote.