House GOP forges ahead with Garland contempt votes despite White House opposition

WASHINGTON (CN) — Bucking pushback from the White House, House Republicans on Thursday continued their effort to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress as they seek audio from the investigation into President Joe Biden’s handling of classified documents.

Lawmakers on both the House Judiciary Committee and House Oversight Committee have introduced resolutions holding the attorney general in contempt for refusing to fully comply with a subpoena demanding unredacted transcripts and recordings from an interview between Biden and special counsel Robert Hur.

Republicans have framed the contempt votes as a response to obstruction from the Justice Department, which they complain has repeatedly refused to turn over the recordings. Audio from Hur’s interview, they argue, is crucial to understanding how the president answered the special counsel’s questions and whether he was able to adequately recall certain details.

But the White House on Thursday morning doubled down on its refusal to turn over the recordings, invoking executive privilege over the information and saying GOP lawmakers are primarily interested in manipulating the audio to embarrass the president or otherwise malign his mental acuity.

That argument wasn’t enough to stop House Republicans, however. The Judiciary Committee voted 18-15 along party lines Thursday afternoon to approve its version of the contempt resolution against Attorney General Garland.

Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, the committee’s GOP chairman, said that invoking executive privilege did not change the fact that the attorney general refused to comply with a congressional subpoena.

“President Biden is asserting executive privilege for the same reason we need the audio recordings,” said Jordan. “They offer a unique perspective.”

Democrats, though, blasted their colleagues for the move to hold Garland in contempt, framing it as a baldly political exercise and panning the Republican scrutiny of President Biden as a waste of taxpayer money.

“The chairman wants to make it seem like he uncovered some wrongdoing by the attorney general,” said New York Representative Jerry Nadler, the Judiciary Committee’s Democratic ranking member.

Nadler said the Justice Department has long been responsive to Republicans’ information requests “in any way that might be material to their long-dead impeachment inquiry.”

“What do our Republican friends do when their investigation comes up short?” he asked. “Simply put, they engage in fantasy.”

Democrats also complained that Republicans had scheduled a committee vote on the contempt resolution at the same time as a series of votes on the House floor that required Nadler to be out of the room for much of the debate.

“It’s a busy week,” Jordan replied to his colleagues’ concern — although he agreed to wait for a final vote on the resolution until Nadler had returned.

Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee approved their own version of the contempt resolution in a marathon session held late Thursday night.

The evening debate, delayed from Thursday morning, prompted some Democrats to accuse the panel’s Republican leadership of accommodating for lawmakers returning from former President Donald Trump’s hush money trial in New York.

Although the Oversight Committee ultimately approved the contempt measure on a 24-20 party line vote, proceedings began with a partisan slugfest as Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene levied personal attacks at several committee Democrats.

Greene’s inflammatory comments sparked nearly an hour of squabbling between lawmakers which saw committee business paused on several occasions.

Democrats, including Oversight Committee ranking member Representative Jamie Raskin, were further incensed when Republicans moved to block lawmakers from offering amendments on the contempt resolution.

Such a drastic move restricting debate on a measure hadn’t happened in the panel’s 70-year history, Raskin complained.

Meanwhile, Oversight Committee chair and Kentucky Representative James Comer doubled down Thursday on the need for the Justice Department to turn over audio recordings from the Hur interview.

“Clearly President Biden and his advisers fear releasing the audio recordings of his interview," he said in a statement, “because it will again reaffirm to the American people that President Biden’s mental state is in decline.”

House Republicans, amid a monthslong impeachment inquiry against the president which has so far failed to produce any solid evidence of wrongdoing, have seized on special counsel Hur’s February report on his investigation, which appeared to question Biden’s mental state.

Hur, who was previously a U.S. attorney appointed by then-President Donald Trump, recommended no charges against Biden but noted in his report that, were the case to go to trial, a jury would be unlikely to convict the president because he presented himself as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Democrats and President Biden have both disputed this characterization. Lawmakers needling Hur during a March appearance on Capitol Hill accused the special counsel of carrying water for Republicans and politicizing his investigation.

Hur, though, denied those charges, arguing at the time that he “called it like I saw it,” and that he did not sanitize information or unfairly disparage the president.

If the full House approves a contempt resolution against someone who fails to comply with a congressional subpoena, they can recommend that the Justice Department pursue charges against that person — which can result in fines or even jail time.

Even if lawmakers agree to hold Garland in contempt of Congress, it’s unlikely he would face any actual consequences.

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