WASHINGTON — The House Judiciary Committee filed a lawsuit Monday seeking audio tapes of President Biden’s interviews with special counsel Robert Hur — after the White House refused to share them, citing concern about the impact on the Nov. 5 election.
The committee filed suit just four days after the 81-year-old incumbent’s disastrous presidential debate performance prompted a groundswell of Democrats to question Biden’s cognitive fitness and call for the party to pick a new candidate.
The Republican-led panel has transcripts of the interviews — after which Hur described Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” — but insists the actual audio tapes of the sit-downs “contain verbal and nonverbal context that is missing from a cold transcript.”
“This dispute is principally about a frivolous assertion of executive privilege,” the committee argues in its suit, noting that the Justice Department provided Congress with roughly five hours of interviews on Oct. 8-9, 2024, but not the audio.
“President Biden’s self-serving attempt to shield the audio recording of his interview with the Special Counsel while publicly releasing a transcript of that same interview represents an astonishing effort to expand the scope of executive privilege from a constitutional privilege safeguarding certain substantive communications to an amorphous privilege that can be molded to protect things like voice inflection, tone, and pace of speech,” the lawsuit says.
“That verbal and nonverbal context is quite important here because the Special Counsel relied on the way that President Biden presented himself during their interview — ‘as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory’— when ultimately recommending that President Biden should not be prosecuted for unlawfully retaining and disclosing classified information,” the suit says.
Biden was accused of illegally stashing sensitive documents, including about US military and foreign policy in Afghanistan, in the garage of his Delaware home as books about his memoirs were being written.
“The audio recordings, not the cold transcripts, are the best available evidence of how President Biden presented himself during the interview,” the lawsuit says. “The Committee thus needs those recordings to assess the Special Counsel’s characterization of the President, which he and White House lawyers have forcefully disputed, and ultimate recommendation that President Biden should not be prosecuted.”
Hur recommended against charging Biden even though he said he found evidence that the president “willfully” mishandled classified information — a crime — leaning largely on Biden’s apparent mental decline in his decision.
The president furiously denied Hur’s assessment of him hours after the special counsel’s report was released in February.
House Republicans subpoenaed the tapes in February, but Biden in May asserted executive privilege at his US attorney general Merrick Garland’s urging.
White House counsel Ed Siskel expressed concern at the time that House Republicans intended to “chop [the tapes] up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes.”
The House of Representatives voted 216-207 last month to hold Garland in contempt for refusing to share the files.
The Republican-held chamber also is seeking tapes of Biden’s ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, allegedly confessing that he deleted incriminating recordings of Biden discussing classified information after learning of Hur’s investigation.
The latest push for the tapes comes as Democrats reel from Biden’s debate performance, where he appeared confused and made incoherent remarks — such as, “We finally beat Medicare.”
A CBS News poll found that 45% of Democrats want Biden to step aside, and even the New York Times editorial board Friday called for the president to allow his party to pick another candidate.
