The House voted on Wednesday to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with Republicans’ demands that he turn over audio recordings of President Joe Biden's interview with the special counsel who probed his handling of classified documents.

The largely party-line vote passed despite the Republican majority's slim margin, with only one GOP lawmaker defecting: Rep. David Joyce of Ohio. All Democrats voted against the resolution.

“It is deeply disappointing that this House of Representatives has turned a serious congressional authority into a partisan weapon," Garland said in a statement. "Today’s vote disregards the constitutional separation of powers, the Justice Department’s need to protect its investigations, and the substantial amount of information we have provided to the Committees. I will always stand up for this Department, its employees, and its vital mission to defend our democracy.”

The White House's decision to exert executive privilege over the audio recording, shielding it from Congress, would make it exceedingly difficult to make a criminal case against Garland, the third attorney general in U.S. history to be held in contempt of Congress. It is unlikely that the Justice Department — which Garland oversees — will prosecute him. 

The move is the latest in a series of actions taken by House Republicans as they wage a political and legal campaign against the Department of Justice and the Biden administration over perceived corruption and the criminal prosecutions of former President Donald Trump. Those prosecutions are being handled by an independent special counsel in two federal cases and local district attorneys in two others, including the New York hush-money trial where Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records late last month. Biden and Garland have denied playing any role in any of the four prosecutions.

“We have to defend the Constitution. We have to defend the authority of Congress. We can’t allow the Department of Justice, an executive branch agency, to hide information from Congress,” Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said at a Wednesday morning press conference. “We have a right to know if [special counsel] Robert Hur’s recommendation against prosecuting President Biden was warranted. And the best evidence… was the audio recordings because they provide critical insight in what that transcript itself cannot provide. We have to know if the transcript was accurate.”

Garland has argued that Congress already has transcripts of the interview and Biden — on Garland’s recommendation — asserted executive privilege to block the release of the audio. Hur, a Trump-appointed U.S. attorney kept on by Garland to continue his investigation into Biden, chose not to prosecute Biden for his handling of classified documents after leaving the vice presidency in 2017.

GOP lawmakers — led by Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and James Comer, R-Ky. — sent a subpoena for audio of Hur’s interviews with Biden during the spring. But the Justice Department only turned over some of the records, leaving out audio of Hur’s interview with the president. Biden’s White House counsel contended last month that Republicans only want the tape “to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes.”

Joyce, the Ohio Republican who was alone in his party to vote against the move, said in a statement that “as a former prosecutor, I cannot in good conscience support a resolution that would further politicize our judicial system to score political points. The American people expect Congress to work for them, solve policy problems, and prioritize good governance. Enough is enough.” 

Republican leaders, including Johnson, said they can’t trust that the DOJ left the transcripts unaltered. Rules Committee Chair Chair Michael Burgess, R-Texas, even baselessly speculated during a hearing on Tuesday that the tapes may have been destroyed, a destruction of evidence that would amount to a federal crime and a political crisis of Nixonian proportions. Democrats say these arguments are a ploy to get the audio to publicize clips of Biden fumbling over his words during an election year.

“The Judiciary Committee under Republican control has spent the last 18 months and 20 million taxpayer dollars in a desperate search to find something, anything that they can use to damage President Biden and to protect Donald Trump,” Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., said during a House floor debate over the resolution on Wednesday. “Spending untold taxpayer money not to benefit the American people, not to feed hungry children, not to address our housing crisis and not to improve our healthcare system. They’re on a single-minded quest to follow every right wing conspiracy theory in the veiled hope that it might lead to some evidence of wrongdoing.”

“And what exactly have they delivered to the American people on their investment? Nothing. No evidence that the conspiracies are true. No indictments, no impeachment, no wins of any significance,” Nadler added.

The impeachment investigation into Biden has largely fizzled out and produced no evidence of wrongdoing as Republicans seek to draw connections between the president and his family members’ business dealings. 

“It's simple. Attorney General Garland holds information vital to the committee's legislative oversight, and the House impeachment inquiry,” Jordan said during the House debate on Wednesday. “Our oversight, and impeachment responsibilities are too important to allow the attorney general to willfully disregard this.”

Jordan, one of the two men spearheading the impeachment investigation into Biden for House Republicans, has drawn criticism from Democrats for pursuing the contempt referral against Garland. Jordan himself was subpoenaed by the Democrat-controlled House Jan. 6 Select Committee in 2022 and was among the five Republicans who refused to cooperate.

At the Wednesday press conference, Johnson argued the committee was illegitimate and Jordan was within his rights to refuse to comply in that case. On the House floor, Jordan claimed he never refused the committee, he just wanted “to know what the parameters of that testimony were going to be.” In a May 2022 letter, Jordan wrote to the committee “to strongly contest the constitutionality and validity of the subpoena.”

At today's @HouseGOP press conference, @SpeakerJohnson and @SteveScalise talked about why they support holding Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress because he "is refusing to comply with a lawful subpoena" and "knows what the rules are."

Since Ohio Rep.… pic.twitter.com/86ctcrpyOx

— Taylor Popielarz (@TaylorPopielarz) June 12, 2024

“It's rich beyond measure, like a billionaire rich, to be asked to hold the attorney general in contempt by people who themselves received subpoenas to testify before the Jan. 6 committee who never rendered a single document nor a single minute of testimony,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said during debate on Wednesday.

Writing for the Washington Post on Tuesday, Garland pushed back on attacks on the DOJ, though he did not specifically address the criminal contempt discussions in Congress. He wrote that “continued unfounded attacks against the Justice Department’s employees are dangerous for people’s safety.” Garland and his department have been frequent subjects of conspiracy theories and false claims by Republicans, including Trump, in response to criminal investigations into Trump.

And earlier this month, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, Garland described the GOP effort to hold him in contempt as the latest in “a long line of attacks" on the Justice Department." Those attacks “have not, and they will not” influence the department's decision making, he said. 

“I will not be intimidated,” Garland said. “And the Justice Department will not be intimidated. We will continue to do our jobs free from political influence. And we will not back down from defending our democracy.”

Republicans used the House Judiciary Committee hearing to push the claim that Biden has weaponized the department to go after Trump. The former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee — who is charged in two criminal cases brought by the Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith — has cast himself as the victim of a politically motivated legal system as he vies to reclaim the White House in November.

Since his conviction in his New York criminal hush-money trial late last month, Trump and his supporters have escalated their attacks on the criminal justice system, slamming prosecutors, the judge and the jury. Trump and his allies have suggested the case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, a state-level prosecutor, was orchestrated by Biden.

“What the American people are sick of is how pathetic this House of Representatives has become. This is a distraction from the fact that the Republican nominee for president is a convicted felon,” Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said at a hearing on Tuesday. “They are irresponsibly attacking the DOJ making absurd claims that it is being weaponized. These contempt resolutions represent more of those attacks.”

The last time an attorney general was held in contempt was in 2019. That was when the Democratically controlled House voted to make then-Attorney General Bill Barr the second sitting Cabinet member to be held in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over documents related to a special counsel investigation into former President Donald Trump.

Years before that, then-Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt related to the gun-running operation known as Operation Fast and Furious. In each of those instances, the Justice Department took no action against the attorney general.

Spectrum News’ Taylor Popielarz and The Associated Press contributed to this report.