WASHINGTON — As expected, the Justice Department confirmed Friday that Attorney General Merrick Garland will not face charges after House Republicans. Voted to hold it in contempt of Congress for refusing to provide Audio tapes of President Joe Biden I mean protected by executive privilege.
“As you know, the President has declared executive privilege and directed the Attorney General’s Office not to release materials subpoenaed by the House Judiciary and Oversight and Accountability Committees (Committees) related to the investigation by Special Counsel Robert K. Hur,” the assistant attorney general said. Gen. Carlos Felipe Uriarte wrote a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on Friday.
“The Department’s long-standing position is that we will not prosecute an official in contempt of Congress for refusing to provide information subpoenaed under the president’s claim of executive privilege, as explained in our May 16, 2024 letter to the Committees,” Uriarte said. . he wrote. “Across administrations of both political parties, we have consistently held that “contempt of Congress was not intended to apply to, and cannot constitutionally apply to, an Executive Branch official who asserts executive privilege.”
The letter noted that then-Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross were not prosecuted after the House of Representatives. voted to hold them in contempt Ministry of Justice in 2019 and in 2022 refused to judge Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino, former Trump White House officials who have not cooperated with subpoenas from the January 6 committee.
Congress is already one Transcript of Biden’s interview with Hur, which investigated the president’s handling of classified documents. Hur declined to prosecute Biden, writing in his report that one reason for not continuing the case was that Biden would be sympathetic to the jury because he could present himself as a human being.an old man with poor memory.” Hur also said the evidence his team gathered “does not establish Mr. Biden’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Garland wrote last month that releasing the records to Congress “would pose an unacceptable risk of undermining the Department’s ability to conduct similar high-profile criminal investigations, particularly those where the voluntary cooperation of White House officials is critical.” He told reporters that the release of the recordings “will harm our ability to successfully pursue sensitive investigations in the future.”
Wreath pushed back He called Republican attacks on the judiciary and the DOJ “unprecedented” and “unwarranted” during a House Judiciary Committee hearing this month. According to him, the Department of Justice will not back down from defending democracy.
In a statement on the Justice Department’s decision, Johnson said he would take action to certify the contempt reports to the DCUS attorney and enforce Garland’s subpoena.
“Unfortunately, while the Biden Administration’s Justice Department aggressively prosecuted Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro for the same thing, it is predictable that they will not prosecute Garland for defying congressional subpoenas,” Johnson said. “This is another example of the two-tier system of justice that the Biden Administration has brought us.”
Julie Tsirkin and Megan Lebowitz contributed.