On Monday, House Republicans threatened to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress over materials from special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents.
Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) and Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent a letter to Garland that claimed the Department of Justice (DOJ) is withholding materials that are responsive to their subpoenas, specifically citing audio recordings of Hur’s interviews with Biden as well as the transcript and audio recordings of Hur’s interviews with Biden’s ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer.
“The February 27 subpoenas create a legal obligation on you to produce this material,” Comer and Jordan wrote. “Accordingly, the Committees expect you to produce all responsive materials no later than 12:00 p.m. on April 8, 2024. If you fail to do so, the Committees will consider taking further action, such as the invocation of contempt of Congress proceedings.”
The Daily Wire reached out to the DOJ seeking comment.
“The Department has been extraordinarily transparent with Congress,” a DOJ spokeswoman said in response. “The Attorney General released Mr. Hur’s report to Congress and made no redactions or changes, the Department provided documents to Congress including a copy of the President’s interview transcript, and Mr. Hur testified before Congress for more than five hours about his investigation.”
The spokeswoman added, “Given the Department’s ongoing and extensive cooperation, we hope they will reconsider this unnecessary escalation.”
Hur’s report, which was released last month, criticized Biden’s retention of classified records following his service as a U.S. senator and vice president, but the prosecutor declined to recommend charges.
The report described Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” whom a jury likely would not convict “of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Biden and the White House have pushed back against Hur’s characterizations in his report, but Garland insisted last week that it would have been “absurd” for someone in his position to have edited or censored the special counsel’s explanation.
Following the release of Hur’s report, Comer and Jordan announced they had subpoenaed Garland, declaring in a cover letter that the DOJ failed to produce any of the materials they had previously requested — including transcripts, notes, video, and audio files.
The chairmen suggested that documents retained by Biden may be pertinent to the corruption-focused impeachment inquiry into the president and said they wanted to know if the White House or Biden’s personal attorneys placed any limitations or scoping restrictions during the interviews.
Comer and Jordan also wrote the Judiciary Committee sought materials for its oversight of the DOJ’s “commitment to impartial justice and its handling of the investigation and prosecution of President Biden’s presumptive opponent, President Donald J. Trump, in the November 2024 presidential election.”
On the March 7 subpoena deadline, the department provided an “insufficient production that only included letters exchanged between President Biden’s legal counsel and the Department, along with an offer to review two classified documents in camera,” the lawmakers wrote in their new letter.
Comer and Jordan said they notified the DOJ on March 9 that the production was “inadequate” and demanded the department produce “all” materials responsive to their subpoenas by the afternoon of March 11, one day before Hur testified before the House Judiciary Committee about his investigation.
Yet again, the DOJ “failed to comply” with their deadline, instead informing committee staff “that an ‘interagency review’ for classified and confidential information was still pending,” the lawmakers wrote. A little more than two hours before Hur was scheduled to testify, the DOJ produced two redacted transcripts of the special counsel’s interviews with Biden, they added.
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Comer and Jordan noted that news reports indicated that “several” news outlets received and reviewed the transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden before they were produced to their committees, even though the DOJ indicated that it only completed the “interagency review” of the transcripts the morning of March 12.
“Because the Department and the White House were presumably the only two entities with copies of the transcripts before the Committees received them, we can only assume that, for political purposes, the Department and White House provided the transcripts to news outlets before the Department completed its “interagency review” process,” the lawmakers wrote. “If that is not the case, we can only assume that the Department misled the Committees about the timing of its completion of such process.”