Department of Justice urged to release recording of Biden’s discussion with Hur

The Department of Justice is facing mounting pressure from Congress and various organizations to provide audio recordings of President Joe Biden’s interview with the special counsel who investigated his handling of classified documents.

The DOJ has thus far resisted the requests from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH), House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), conservative groups such as Judicial Watch, and CNN, resulting in escalating legal pursuits, a tense impasse with Congress, and healthy doses of criticism.

“This is yet another brazen cover-up,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement Tuesday. “The Biden Justice Department’s political gambit in asserting Joe Biden’s privacy concerns in order to withhold audio of his criminal interviews with the special counsel really takes the cake.”

Judicial Watch, as well as the Heritage Foundation and CNN, have filed legal complaints in an attempt to enforce Freedom of Information Act requests for the recordings, which feature Biden interviewing with former special counsel Robert Hur about how the president handled classified material from when he was vice president and senator.

Hur found after a yearlong investigation that Biden mishandled classified documents as well as disclosed classified information to the ghostwriter of his 2017 book, Promise Me, Dad.

However, based on the interview Hur conducted with Biden, Hur found that the president might give a jury reasonable doubt that he acted willfully because he came off as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” The president’s mental acuity was one reason Hur said he declined to prosecute Biden.

The DOJ did provide to Congress a redacted transcript of Hur’s interview with Biden, and the transcript confirmed the president did indeed have memory lapses at times. At other times, though, Biden was quick-witted and recalled information without a problem.

Audio recordings of the interview could shed additional light on the president’s mental fitness, revealing the pace at which he spoke, filler words, or other exchanges not captured through a written transcript.

According to court papers filed Tuesday, the DOJ is preparing to fight Judicial Watch, Heritage, and CNN in a joint lawsuit over its position that the audio recordings are exempt from being made public under FOIA because of privacy provisions and concern for the chilling effect it could have on law enforcement.

“Obviously, the public’s right to know outweighs Joe Biden’s privacy in this widely public case,” Fitton said.

In recent letters to Congress obtained by the Washington Examiner, a DOJ spokesman emphasized the department had already provided most of the material Jordan and Comer requested and that providing the audio could hinder future DOJ investigations by discouraging witnesses from talking to law enforcement.

“The Committees have already received the extraordinary accommodation of the transcripts, which gives you the information you say you need,” Carlos Uriarte, an assistant attorney general, wrote to the chairmen on April 8. “To go further by producing the audio files would compound the likelihood that future prosecutors will be unable to secure this level of cooperation. They might have a harder time obtaining consent to an interview at all. It is clearly not in the public interest to render such cooperation with prosecutors and investigators less likely in the future.”

The chairmen, dissatisfied, responded by threatening contempt of Congress, leading Uriarte to reiterate the department’s stance on April 25 and claim contempt would be illegitimate because of Jordan and Comer’s “inability to identify a need for these files.”

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“We have also repeatedly urged the Committees to avoid unnecessary conflict and to respect the public interest in the Department’s ability to conduct effective investigations by protecting sensitive law enforcement files,” Uriarte wrote.

The stalemate signals Congress’s next moves will be to begin contempt proceedings or negotiate some middle ground with the department, while in court, organizations aiming to obtain the recordings from the DOJ could see legal proceedings play out well into the summer.