President Biden asserted executive privilege over the audio and video recordings from the special counsel probe into his handling of classified materials and will refuse congressional requests to hand them over, the White House and the Justice Department told House Republican leaders Thursday. The letters were sent hours before the GOP-led House Oversight and Judiciary committees were scheduled to advance a contempt resolution against Attorney General Merrick Garland for defying a subpoena that demanded the recordings, which include hours of Special Counsel Robert Hur interviewing Biden, the Washington Post reports. Garland told Biden that releasing the tapes would “damage future law enforcement efforts," particularly as investigators request voluntary cooperation in their probes from White House officials.
The White House letter to House Republicans echoes those concerns and accuses Republicans of wanting to “distort” the recordings for political gain. “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,” said White House counsel Edward Siskel. “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.” Garland appointed Hur to investigate the handling of classified documents found at a former Biden office and his Delaware home. Hur concluded that there was not enough proof to charge the president with crimes. He wrote that his decision was influenced by the fact that if Biden was prosecuted, 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.” House Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) says the committee needed all documents and communications related to the special counsel’s interview in order to determine “whether President Biden willfully retained classified information and documents related to Ukraine to assist his family’s business dealings or to enrich his family.”
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