President Joe Biden has invoked executive privilege to block a subpoena from House Republicans to obtain audio recordings of his interviews with special counsel Robert Hur on his handling of classified documents.
The White House and the Justice Department announced the decision in letters to House Republican leaders Thursday, just before the House Oversight and Judiciary Committees were scheduled to advance a contempt resolution against Attorney General Merrick Garland for withholding the recordings.
A full 80 percent of Democrats support the Justice Department’s appointment of a special counsel to investigate President Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified documents, a CNN poll found Wednesday (Wodicka/ullstein bild via Getty Images, Andrew Harnick/AP).
“Because of the President’s longstanding commitment to protecting the integrity, effectiveness, and independence of the Department of Justice and its law enforcement investigations, he has decided to assert executive privilege over the recordings,” White House counsel Ed Siskel wrote in a letter.
Siskel also accused House Republicans of wanting to use the recordings for “partisan political purposes.”
“The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal —to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes,” he wrote, according to the letter.
“Demanding such sensitive and constitutionally-protected law enforcement materials from the Executive Branch because you want to manipulate them for potential political gain is inappropriate,” he wrote.
This is a developing report.
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