The House is expected to vote on Wednesday on a resolution to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress.
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Mandel Ngan/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
The House is expected to vote on Wednesday on a resolution to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress.
Mandel Ngan/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
The Republican-led House of Representatives is expected to vote on Wednesday to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, intensifying a tug-of-war over President Joe Biden’s tape of an interview with a special counsel.
A federal criminal investigation ended this year without Biden being charged with mishandling classified information, in part because special counsel Robert Hull concluded that a jury would likely find the president to be a “compassionate, well-intentioned, Old people with poor memory.”
Read the special counsel’s report on Biden’s handling of classified documents
Top Republican leaders began counting votes Tuesday night to ensure the bill can pass the narrowly divided House. If Republicans win, Garland would become the third attorney general to be censured by the House for defying congressional subpoenas. But the fallout may end there, as Biden has claimed executive privilege over the tapes, providing Garland with legal protection from any further investigation.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told NPR he expected the House to approve the contempt resolutions and said he had not heard any reservations about them from fellow Republicans.
Democrats pointed out that Jordan, who mainly advocated contempt for Garland, refused to cooperate with the House of Representatives committee’s January 6 2022 investigation. . Jordan told NPR he never told the committee he wouldn’t attend and insisted he negotiated with the committee. “This is different — Merrick Garland said you don’t understand,” referring to the tape, adding, “There’s no room for negotiation.”
He and other House Republicans argued Tuesday that the Justice Department waived its privilege to withhold the tapes once they provided transcripts of Biden’s interviews to committees.
Democrats, Justice Department reject premise for contempt proceedings
The attorney general said he had reached an unusual settlement with lawmakers. Special Counsel Hall provided five hours of congressional testimony on his findings. The Justice Department also turned over written transcripts of Biden interviews and letters between Biden and White House lawyers.
Garland sought to cast the contempt proceedings as part of a series of attacks on the Justice Department and its career employees by partisans intent on expressing political views.
“Political division is good for our democracy,” Garland wrote in an op-ed this week. “They are normal. But using conspiracy theories, lies, violence and threats of violence to influence political outcomes is not normal. The short-term political gains of these tactics will never offset the long-term costs to our country.”
Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, expanded on that argument Tuesday during a hearing on contempt of court charges.
“This is not really a policy disagreement with the Department of Justice. This is an attempt to shore up the MAGA base after 18 months of investigations that have failed time and time again,” Nadler said.
Nadler also insisted that the president’s tapes could easily be manipulated by House Republicans, pointing to instances in which witnesses who appeared before the panel last year resulted in threats.
Asked whether Democrats would unite against a contempt resolution, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries told NPR that he expected an “overwhelming majority” of Democrats to vote against it. He called the effort “frivolous, unconscionable, unnecessary and un-American.”
Republicans say Garland must provide more information
But leaders of the House Oversight and Judiciary committees say they have legitimate reasons to request the tape of Biden’s interview, arguing it could help advance the stalled impeachment inquiry into Biden and assess whether new legislation is needed to protect sensitive or confidential information.
The tapes also help prove that the 81-year-old Biden is losing capacity, a pillar of the Republican campaign against Biden in the 2024 presidential election.
“If the attorney general wants to defy Congress and not provide the recordings, he will face the consequences of those actions,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., recently declared.
Biden’s decision to invoke executive privilege not only shields his attorney general from a criminal contempt investigation, but also prevents the audio from appearing in campaign ads.
“Frankly, the White House has every reason to be concerned about the audio being released because it could be edited and used in various ways for election-year political campaigns to make the president look and sound bad,” said George Mason of the University. political scientist Mark Rozelle told NPR.
Biden blocks release of his classified interview tapes
The Heritage Foundation and several media organizations are suing under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the tapes, but it’s unclear whether they will succeed before the November election.
