The House GOP is accelerating efforts and turning to new pathways to try to force Attorney General Merrick Garland to turn over the audio of special counsel Robert Hur’s interview with President Joe Biden relating to his handling of classified documents.
The House GOP's latest push came on Wednesday when Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., told reporters that the House Judiciary Committee would file a lawsuit against the Department of Justice next week seeking to enforce their subpoena that insists Garland hand over the audio.
“We will fight vigorously to get it,” Johnson said during a leadership press conference on Wednesday.
Johnson’s announcement comes as talk swirled this week over an effort by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., to enforce the subpoena through a little-known method called inherent contempt. Such a move would enable the House sergeant-at-arms to forcibly bring Garland to Capitol Hill and detain him until he complied with the subpoena.
Despite questions about whether the rarely-attempted method would get enough support to pass, in her own press conference on Wednesday, Luna said she would proceed with a vote on the matter on Friday.
“Garland still has time to comply with this request, we are asking that he bring the tapes to the House and let us listen to them,” she said. “But in the event that he does not, we will press forward with calling the privileged motion on inherent contempt to the floor on Friday morning.”
Johnson was vague about his take on that particular move when asked about it on Wednesday but made clear his conference would continue to look for new ways to get the tapes.
“There are a lot of different ideas and discussions people are brainstorming on how might we acquire access to those tapes,” Johnson said Wednesday. “We’re looking at all avenues, I’ve talked to Anna Paulina Luna and other colleagues about various ideas but I don’t think anything has been settled on as of yet.’
“We’re going to be as aggressive as we can and use every tool in our arsenal,” the speaker added.
In a largely party-line vote earlier this month, the House voted to hold Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to hand over the recordings of Hur’s interview with Biden. Only one Republican voted against the move.
But the Justice Department, which the attorney general heads, promptly made clear it will not prosecute Garland in response, noting Biden’s assertion of executive privilege over the audio. The White House in May notified the House that it was invoking executive privilege over the tapes, something Garland suggested.
Republicans and the public have had access to the transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden for months but the GOP argues it needs the audio to carry out its responsibility of oversight, including to confirm the written version is accurate.
Garland and the Department of Justice argue, among other things, that the release of tapes could hinder future investigations, leading to sources to be less cooperative in the future if they fear recordings could be released.
Hur was the special counsel tasked with investigating Biden’s handling of classified documents. In an attention-grabbing report, he concluded that the president should not be charged for his actions around the documents because the evidence did not prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. But added it was his line that Biden “would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” that prompted headlines. Republicans have seized upon the comment while the White House, as well as Biden himself, has aggressively pushed back on it.