WASHINGTON — Republicans on Wednesday held U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, a symbolic rebuke of the nation’s top law enforcement official.
Garland declined to turn over the tapes of President Joe Biden’s October 2023 interview with former special counsel Robert Hur during Hur’s investigation into Biden’s mishandling of classified information after he was vice president.
As Hur explained in his report, one of the reasons he decided not to prosecute Biden is because the president would have appeared to a jury as an “older man with a bad memory.”
The Justice Department had already made the transcript of the interview public, but Republicans said they need the audio to verify its accuracy.
“The transcripts alone are not sufficient evidence of the state of the president’s memory,” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said before the vote.
And House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) told reporters last month that he suspected the transcript could have been redacted by a Justice Department purportedly protecting the Bidens.
“We have every reason to doubt some of the things they would do,” Comer said. “Someone has protected this family for many, many years.”
But if the Justice Department changed the transcript to protect Biden, it did not yield a good result. Biden at one point struggles to fit the year of his own son’s death into a series of major life events, including his decision not to run for president in 2016.
Contempt resolutions typically ask the Justice Department to prosecute the person in contempt — an unlikely outcome in Garland’s case. Biden has asserted executive privilege over the unedited audio, and Garland said releasing it would discourage future witnesses from cooperating with investigations as Biden did.
Jordan said the contempt resolution would likely end up in court.
Republicans in the House of Representatives have issued subpoenas for Hur’s investigative materials as part of their impeachment inquiry against Biden, which has focused on whether the president participated in his son’s foreign business deals. With actual articles of impeachment looking unlikely, the Garland contempt vote could be the culmination of the impeachment effort.
“This contempt vote is MAGA Republicans’ desperate attempt to save face after their many failed investigations,” Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) said during the debate before the vote. “They promised Trump and the American people they would impeach President Biden, but after spending more than $20 million investigating conspiracy theories, the MAGA Republicans have nothing to show for it.”
Both the House Judiciary and Oversight committees passed contempt resolutions against Garland. The oversight committee markup will live in infamy as one of the most chaotic committee meetings of all time, after Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) insulted Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) “bleach blonde, poorly built, butch body.”
