WASHINGTON — The Justice Department confirmed Friday, as expected, that Attorney General Merrick Garland will not face charges after House Republicans voted to hold him in contempt of Congress for refusing to provide audiotapes of the president Joe Biden that are protected by executive privilege.
“As you know, the President asserted executive privilege and directed the Attorney General not to disclose materials subpoenaed by the House Committees on the Judiciary and Oversight and Accountability (Committees) relating to the investigation conducted by Special Counsel Robert K. Hur,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Gen. Carlos Felipe Uriarte wrote in a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on Friday.
“The Department’s long-standing position is that we will not hold an official in contempt of Congress for refusing to provide subpoenaed information subject to a presidential assertion of executive privilege, as explained in our letter to the Committees dated May 16, 2024,” Uriarte he wrote. “Throughout administrations of both political parties, we have consistently adhered to the position that ‘congressional disregard of the statute was not intended to be applied and could not be constitutionally applied to an executive branch official asserting a claim to executive privilege. President.”
The letter noted that then-Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross were not prosecuted after the House voted to hold them in contempt in 2019. In 2022, the Department of Justice also refused to sue former Trump White House officials Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino, who did not cooperate with the commission’s Jan. 6 subpoenas.
Congress already has a transcript of Biden’s interview with Hur, who investigated the president’s handling of classified documents. Hur declined to prosecute Biden, writing in his report that one reason for not moving forward with the case was that Biden would be sympathetic to a jury because he might portray himself as an “elderly man with a 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 turning over the recordings to Congress “would create an unacceptable risk of undermining the Department’s ability to conduct similar high-profile criminal investigations — in particular, investigations in which the voluntary cooperation of White House officials is critically important.” He told reporters that releasing audiotapes “would harm our ability in the future to successfully conduct sensitive investigations.”
Garland dismissed Republican attacks on the judicial system and the DOJ, calling them “unprecedented” and “baseless” during a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee this month. The Justice Department, he said, “will not give up defending democracy.
In a statement about the Justice Department’s decision, Johnson said he would certify the contempt reports to the DCUS attorney and enforce Garland’s subpoena.
“It is sadly predictable that the Biden administration’s Justice Department will not prosecute Garland for defying Congressional subpoenas, even though the department has aggressively prosecuted Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro for the same thing,” Johnson continued in the statement. “This is yet another example of the two-tier justice system brought to us by the Biden administration.”
Julie Tsirkin It is Megan Lebowitz contributed.
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