House GOP Starts Contempt Proceedings Against AG Garland

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The attorney general has failed to turn over subpoenaed materials to two House committees.

Two House committees will kick off contempt proceedings against Attorney General Merrick Garland on May 16 as he seeks to block them from obtaining special counsel Robert Hur’s recorded interviews with President Joe Biden.

Despite subpoenas compelling his cooperation, Mr. Garland has refused to provide House impeachment investigators with the recordings from Mr. Hur’s probe of the president’s handling of classified documents.

Now, amid the possibility of being held in contempt of Congress, the attorney general has asked the president to assert executive privilege to block investigators from obtaining the tapes—a request the president has granted.

“I write to inform you that the President has asserted executive privilege over the requested audio recordings and is making a protective assertion of privilege over any remaining materials responsive to the subpoenas that have not already been produced,” Assistant Attorney General Carlos Uriarte wrote in a May 16 letter—first obtained by Politico—to the chairmen of the House Judiciary and Oversight and Accountability committees.

The letter was sent on the same day members of the two committees were set to begin marking up two separate resolutions to hold Mr. Garland in contempt.

“The House Oversight and Judiciary Committees issued lawful subpoenas to Attorney General Garland for the audio recordings of President Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Hur, yet he continues to defy our subpoenas,” Oversight and Accountability Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said in a May 13 statement.

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“These audio recordings are important to our investigation of President Biden’s willful retention of classified documents and his fitness to be President of the United States. There must be consequences for refusing to comply with lawful congressional subpoenas and we will move to hold Attorney General Garland in contempt of Congress.”

The chairman’s announcement coincided with Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan’s (R-Ohio) release of a report recommending contempt proceedings against Mr. Garland for his noncompliance with the subpoenas.

While the Justice Department has provided the committees with transcripts of the solicited recordings, the department has refused to turn over the recordings themselves. Audio recordings, impeachment investigators have noted, are “materially different” from transcripts, which can be altered.

In his report, Mr. Jordan noted that Mr. Garland “invoked no constitutional or legal privilege” negating his obligation to fully comply with the subpoenas.

Seemingly in response, Mr. Garland wrote to President Biden on May 15 urging him to assert executive privilege.

“The Committees’ needs are plainly insufficient to outweigh the deleterious effects that productions of the recordings would have on the integrity and effectiveness of similar law enforcement investigations in the future,” he wrote.

The attorney general also noted that he did not think the committees would be able to overcome an assertion of executive privilege in a court challenge.

Impeachment Inquiry

While the Republican committee chairmen have charged that Mr. Garland’s defiance warrants a referral for prosecution, not all members of their committees agree.

“This contempt markup has more to do with helping the Trump campaign than any legitimate disagreement with the DOJ,” the Judiciary Democrats wrote on social media.
Likewise, Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.), a member of the Oversight and Accountability Committee, derided the move as an attempt to distract from what he described as Republicans’ failed “impeachment sham.”
Many House Republicans have long held that President Biden should be impeached for alleged bribery and influence peddling, but an ongoing impeachment inquiry has stalled, particularly after a key witness was indicted by federal prosecutors over alleged lying about the Bidens engaging in a bribery scheme in Ukraine.

The chamber did manage to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in February over his handling of the southern border, but the trial was quickly dismissed by the Democrat-controlled Senate.

Mr. Comer has floated the idea of sending a criminal referral to the Justice Department instead of proceeding with a vote on impeachment of the president.

“What does real accountability look like? Does it look like impeaching Joe Biden in the House and then the Senate tabling it like they’re going to do with the Merrick Garland impeachment? Or does it mean providing real criminal referrals to the Department of Justice? I think the latter,” he said in March.

Holding Mr. Garland in contempt would typically work much the same way. If approved by the full House, a referral would be made to the Justice Department. The invocation of executive privilege, however, essentially precludes any prosecution of the attorney general over his failure to comply.

“President Biden is apparently afraid for the citizens of this country and everyone to hear those tapes,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said of the move at a press conference. “They obviously confirm what the special counsel has found, and would likely cause, I suppose, in his estimation, such alarm of the American people that the president is using all of his power to suppress their release.”

If impeachment investigators wish to push forward, a court battle will likely be necessary to overcome the president’s assertion of privilege.

Jackson Richman and Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.

Original News Source Link – Epoch Times

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