Biden Clamps Down on Potentially Disastrous Special Counsel Recording
President Joe Biden invoked executive privilege Thursday to keep House Republicans from obtaining audio recordings of his interview with special counsel Robert Hur.
The move came at the request of Attorney General Merrick Garland, who warned that cooperating with the request could jeopardize future investigations and witnesses’ willingness to participate in them. In his letter to Biden, made public Thursday, Garland said that lawmakers’ efforts “are plainly insufficient to outweigh the deleterious effects that the production of the recordings would have on the integrity and effectiveness of similar law enforcement investigations in the future.”
White House counsel Ed Siskel also questioned the motivations of Republicans seeking the tapes when they already possess a lengthy report and full transcript of the interview.
“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,” Siskel wrote in a letter obtained by The Hill. “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.”
Hur’s 388-page report condemned the 81-year-old president as having a memory with “significant limitations.” Republicans have since seized on the analysis, developed after a year-long investigation and a two-day interview with Biden days after Hamas’s October 7 attack in Israel, as an opportunity to attack the president as being mentally unfit for the job.
Democratic lawmakers joined the outrage at the request, including Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, who called the effort to obtain the tapes—and Republicans’ failed impeachment effort of Biden—a “comedy of errors.”
“The Attorney General gave Republicans the information they asked for, and it’s delightfully absurd to suggest that listening to the President’s words instead of just reading them will suddenly reveal the mystery high crime and misdemeanor the Republicans have been unable to identify since 2023,” Raskin wrote in a statement shared with The New Republic. “Will this hopeless scavenger hunt ever end? Perhaps the Republicans should play the Beatles’ White Album backwards and the impeachable offense will emerge!”