A Republican-led House panel is set to vote on a contempt charge next week for U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland over his refusal to turn over the audio tapes of special counsel Robert Hur’s interview with President Joe Biden, the Washington Examiner reported Monday.
The House Judiciary Committee will hold a vote on May 16, according to the report.
The panel is moving forward after Garland twice has snubbed a subpoena to turn over the recordings. The most recent came April 25, when the DOJ in a letter cited concerns about their potential misuse and the lack of a legitimate legislative or impeachment purpose for their release.
Republicans seek the tapes, arguing they would provide valuable context and nuance that cannot be captured through written transcripts alone.
Audio recordings provide "a unique and invaluable medium of information that capture vocal tone, pace, inflections, verbal nuance, and other idiosyncrasies,” committee Chairs Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and James Comer, R-Ky., wrote to Garland.
Republicans want to hear for themselves how Hur reached the conclusion to not prosecute Biden for mishandling classified documents, based on his determination that Biden would be characterized in any legal proceedings as a "sympathetic, well-intentioned elderly man with a faulty memory."
If the full House were to vote to hold Garland in contempt, it would mark the fourth such judgment against a Cabinet member in history, according to the report. Garland would join former Attorneys General Eric Holder (2012) and Bill Barr (2019) and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (2019).
A contempt charge generates a criminal referral to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington, D.C., which then weighs whether to prosecute Garland, the Justice Department chief. That is highly unlikely; Holder and Barr were not prosecuted by their own departments.
Separately Monday, Jordan sent another letter to the attorney for Mark Zwonitzer, the ghostwriter of Biden’s book with whom the president shared classified documents. Jordan set a deadline for later this month for Louis Freeman to turn over the documents that they first subpoenaed to obtain on March 22.
Freeman replied on April 12 with objections to turn over the documents that Jordan’s committee seeks, to which Jordan wrote, “The objections raised are unfounded and do not excuse your client from complying with a congressional subpoena.”
Jordan gave Freeman until May 20 to produce the documents or face “further action against your client, such as the invocation of contempt of Congress proceedings.”