Biden invokes executive privilege on special counsel recording demanded by GOP

President Biden has invoked executive privilege to block House Republicans from obtaining audio recordings of his interviews with special counsel Robert Hur over his handling of classified documents.

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday requested the president assert executive privilege over the recordings, which had been subpoenaed by the House Judiciary and Oversight committees.

“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 obtained by The Hill.

Siskel also called into question the motives of Republicans seeking the recordings.

“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,” Siskel wrote. “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.”

While Hur’s report 345-page concluded no charges should be brought against the president, its descriptions of Biden’s memory lapses and the description of the president as a well-meaning, elderly man” set off a political firestorm. 

Among other instances, Hur cited Biden’s 2017 conversations with ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer, which the special counsel described as “painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.”

Siskel noted in his letter to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and House Oversight and Accountability Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) that Biden did not assert privilege over any part of Hur’s lengthy report. 

The transcript of Biden’s interview with Hur, which took place over two days last October, was also released ahead of the special counsel’s public testimony on Capitol Hill in March.

But Garland, in a letter to Biden dated Wednesday, warned that disclosing the audio recordings risked harming future investigations by making it less likely that witnesses would cooperate.

Updated at 9:12 a.m.