The House Judiciary Committee filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Merrick Garland in an effort to obtain the audio tapes of President Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur.
The lawsuit calls for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to overrule its claim of executive privilege for Biden and demand that Garland hand over the recordings.
According to an internal DOJ document, “Consistent with this longstanding position, no U.S. Attorney has pursued criminal contempt charges against an Executive Branch official asserting the President’s claim of executive privilege.”
The move comes as Garland was recently found in contempt of Congress by the House of Representatives for his refusal to provide the audio recordings of Biden’s interview.
According to the lawsuit, “audio recordings, not the cold transcripts, are the best available evidence of how President Biden presented himself during the interview.”
“The Committee thus needs those recordings to assess the Special Counsel’s characterization of the President, which he and White House lawyers have forcefully disputed, and ultimate recommendation that President Biden should not be prosecuted,” it reads.
“President Biden’s self-serving attempt to shield the audio recording of his interview with the Special Counsel while publicly releasing a transcript of that same interview represents an astonishing effort to expand the scope of executive privilege from a constitutional privilege safeguarding certain substantive communications to an amorphous privilege that can be molded to protect things like voice inflection, tone, and pace of speech,” the committee states in the suit. “Any privilege that could conceivably apply to President Biden’s interview with the Special Counsel was waived when the Executive Branch released a transcript of that interview to the press and produced that transcript to the Committee.”
