Democrats strike back at GOP effort to hold AG Merrick Garland in contempt

WASHINGTON – Democrats are pushing back at an expected vote in the House to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt for refusing to hand over the audio recordings of President Joe Biden’s interviews with special counsel Robert Hur.

In a memo to Democrats sitting on the GOP-led House Oversight Committee, the top Democrat on the panel, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., chides Republicans for “attempting to hold the Attorney General in contempt based on meritless and preposterous claims of obstruction.”

Raskin argues in the memo that House Republicans are “desperate to blame someone – anyone – for the utter failure” of their impeachment inquiry into Biden and have “contrived an allegation that Attorney General Merrick Garland has impeded” their probe by withholding the audio of the interview.

House Republicans are preparing a contempt resolution against Garland, to be taken for a vote as early as Wednesday. While a handful of GOP lawmakers have yet to say if they would support the resolution, the coming vote sometime this week is a sign that Republican leaders are confident they can pass it.

House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, have pressured Garland and the Department of Justice to release the audio recordings of Hur’s interview with the president after his report described Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

The DOJ has refused to hand over the recordings but have provided GOP investigators with transcripts of the interview, arguing that giving the audio could endanger future investigations if interview subjects know interviews could be publicly released. The Justice Department also accused Republicans of wanting to use the recordings for political purposes.

"I view contempt as a serious matter. But I will not jeopardize the ability of our prosecutors and agents to do their jobs effectively in future investigations. I will not be intimidated," Garland said at a testy hearing held by the House Judiciary Committee last week.

Biden went a step further last month and asserted that the recordings fall under executive privilege. That incensed Republicans and spurred them to draft contempt resolutions against Garland.

In their report recommending that the House should hold Garland in contempt, GOP lawmakers argue that while they have the transcripts, the audio recordings “are of superior evidentiary value” because they offer “important verbal context, such as tone or tenor, or nonverbal context, such as pauses or pace of delivery.”

“The verbal nuances in President Biden’s answer about his mishandling of classified information would assist the committee’s inquiry” into whether Biden abused his positions in public office for his family’s financial benefit, the report read.

Raskin said the notion that the recording “could possibly reveal evidence of impeachable conduct is simply ludicrous,” given that the existing transcripts provide the exact words that Biden told special counsel Hur.

Republicans have long accused Biden of improperly benefiting from his family’s business dealings. But their impeachment probe has largely fizzled out as investigators have found no evidence directly tying the president to his family's business affairs.

“The audio recording of that interview will not in any way change the President’s words, nor will it miraculously reveal the evidence of impeachable conduct that Committee Republicans have vainly sought in the 3.8 million pages of documents and 80 hours of testimony collected as part of their 17-month impeachment inquiry,” Raskin concludes in the memo.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Raskin blasts effort to hold AG Garland in contempt as GOP preps vote