President Joe Biden is blocking the release of an audio recording of his interview with then-Special Counsel Robert Hur.
On Thursday, Biden asserted executive privilege over the recording as House Republicans are threatening to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt for not handing the audio over.
The Associated Press reports, “Garland advised Biden in a letter on Thursday that the audio falls within the scope of executive privilege. Garland told the Democratic president that the “committee’s needs 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.”
Assistant Attorney General Carlos Felipe Uriarte called the potential decision to hold Garland in contempt “unnecessary and unwarranted conflict.”
“It is the longstanding position of the executive branch held by administrations of both parties that an official who asserts the president’s claim of executive privilege cannot be held in contempt of Congress,” he said in a letter to lawmakers.
Meanwhile, White House Counsel Ed Siske claimed Republicans do not have a legitimate reason for seeking the audio of the interview and instead insisted they simply want to “chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes.”
The AP explains the move “is a tacit admission that there are moments from the interview it fears portray Biden in a negative light in an election year — and that could be exacerbated by the release, or selective release, of the audio.
In report detailing Hur’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents, the special counsel declined to charge the president, but offered several shocking claims in his report about the president’s memory, including that he did not remember “even within several years, when his son Beau died.”
Biden sought to push back on that in a press conference as he said, “There is even reference that I don’t remember when my son died. How in the hell dare he raise that?”
He added, “Frankly, when I was asked the question I thought to myself, it wasn’t any of their damn business.”
However, a transcript of the interview shows it was Biden who brought up the death of his son.
CBS News notes throughout the interview, “[Biden] also misstates the year former President Donald Trump was elected and questions which year his own vice presidency ended. Mr. Biden is quickly corrected by attorneys in the room. Throughout the interview, Mr. Biden appears to be reaching for words he cannot find. Twice, the phrase ‘fax machine’ eludes him, and he confuses Iraq and Afghanistan for Iran.”
