House Republicans Sue DOJ for Access to Biden-Hur Audio as Concerns Mount over President’s Fitness

As concerns mount over President Joe Biden’s mental capacities, House Republicans are moving forward with their push to obtain audio recordings from special counsel Robert Hur’s two-day interview with Biden last year.

The House Judiciary Committee filed a lawsuit against Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday in D.C. district court to contest the Biden administration’s invocation of executive privilege to withhold the audio.

Upon Garland’s recommendation, Biden invoked executive privilege in May to protect the audio from being released after the Justice Department repeatedly rejected House Republicans’s demands to comply with a subpoena for the Hur interview recordings.

“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 asserts.

“President Biden’s invocation of executive privilege lacks any merit. The Committee therefore asks this Court to overrule the assertion of executive privilege and order that Attorney General Garland produce the audio recordings of the Special Counsel’s interviews with President Biden and Mr. Zwonitzer to the Committee.”

In June, House Republicans voted to hold Garland in contempt of congress over his failure to turn over the Biden-Hur audio. Garland became the third attorney general in American history to face a contempt citation.

Soon after, the Justice Department told House Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) it would not prosecute Garland for contempt of congress. Johnson replied by vowing to take the Justice Department to court to fight for the Biden-Hur audio.

Two conservative organizations, the Heritage Foundation and Judicial Watch, have partnered with a coalition of news outlets in a separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department for the audio recordings. In recent court filings, the Justice Department defended its use of executive privilege and warned of the potential manipulation of the audio through the use of artificial intelligence technologies.

In February, the Justice Department released Hur’s final report on his investigation into Biden’s handling of classified information. Although Hur determined that Biden “willfully” mishandled classified documents as a private citizen, the special counsel declined to recommend criminal charges against Biden.

Hur’s report brought fresh scrutiny to Biden’s age, 81, and his mental capacities by noting that a jury would likely perceive of Biden as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Biden’s memory struggles were apparent in his lengthy interview with Hur, especially when he appeared to struggle to remember exactly when he was vice president and the date his late son Beau passed away.

Right before Hur testified in March, transcripts of his Biden interview were released and seemed to corroborate his report’s findings on Biden’s memory issues. During his testimony, Hur defended the contents of his report and confirmed that the White House pushed him to soften his language on Biden’s age. Despite Hur’s refusal to pursue criminal charges against Biden, congressional Democrats repeatedly claimed Hur was a partisan prosecutor and suggested he seeks a position in a potential Trump administration next year.

Last week, Biden showed severe mental deficiencies during the first presidential debate against former president Donald Trump. Throughout his disastrous debate performance, Biden stumbled over his words and had difficulties maintaining his trains of thought, as Trump remained uncharacteristically restrained.

Biden’s historically disastrous debate appears to have vindicated Hur’s observations, and has prompted numerous calls for him to step aside in favor of a more capable Democratic presidential candidate.