U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland leaves for a recess during a House Judiciary Committee hearing entitled “Oversight of the U.S. Department of Justice,” in Washington, DC, U.S., June 4, 2024.
Anna Rose Layden | Reuters
WASHINGTON – The Justice Department confirmed Friday, as expected, that Attorney General Merrick Garland will not be indicted after Republicans in the House of Representatives. voted to hold him in contempt of Congress for refusing to provide audio tapes of President Joe Biden those are protected by executive privilege.
“As you know, the President has exercised his executive privilege and directed the Attorney General not to release materials subpoenaed by the House Committees on the Judiciary and Oversight and Accountability (Committees) regarding the investigation that was conducted by Special Counsel Robert K. Hur,” Assistant U.S. Attorney General Carlos Felipe Uriarte wrote in a letter Friday to House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.
“The Department's long-standing position is that we will not prosecute an official for contempt of Congress for refusing to provide subpoenaed information subject to a presidential assertion of executive privilege, as explained in our May 16, 2024 letter to the committees,” Uriarte said. wrote. “Throughout administrations of both political parties, we have consistently maintained that 'the contempt of the statute of Congress was not intended to apply and could not constitutionally be applied to an officer of the executive branch who challenges the President's claim to asserts executive privilege.”
The letter noted that then-Attorney General William Barr and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross were not prosecuted after the House of Representatives voted to hold them in contempt in 2019. In 2022 also the Ministry of Justice declined to prosecute former Trump White House officials Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino, who did not cooperate with the committee's Jan. 6 subpoenas.
Congress already has one transcript of Biden's interview with Hur, which investigated the president's handling of classified documents. Hur declined to prosecute Biden, writing in his report that one reason for not pursuing the case was so that Biden would be sympathetic to a jury because he could portray himself as a “elderly man with a bad memoryHur also said the evidence his team gathered “does not establish Mr. Biden's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Garland wrote last month that giving the recordings to Congress “would pose an unacceptable risk of undermining the Department's ability to conduct similar high-profile criminal investigations — particularly those involving the voluntary cooperation of White House officials.” Home is extremely important.” He told reporters that releasing audio tapes would “damage our ability to successfully conduct sensitive investigations in the future.”
Garland pushed back against Republican attacks on the justice system and the DOJ, which they called “unprecedented” and “baseless” during a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee this month. The Justice Department, he said, “will not shy away from defending democracy.
Johnson's office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
