Dem
51
GOP
49
On Wednesday, the House—well, the Republicans in the House—voted to hold AG Merrick Garland in contempt because the Department of Justice refused to turn over recordings from former special counsel Robert Hur's classified-document interviews with Joe Biden. After the vote, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) handed the referral over to the DoJ, requesting that they commence a prosecution of Garland. Yesterday, in a surprise to nobody, the DoJ politely declined the request.
The DoJ's letter to Johnson, which went out under the signature of Assistant AG Carlos Uriarte, laid out two main rationales for the refusal. The first is that department policy dictates that such materials will not be shared, and such prosecutions will not be mounted, when executive privilege has been invoked (as it has here). Uriarte pointed to numerous recent examples from administrations of both parties, including Harriet Miers and Joshua Bolten (George W. Bush), Eric Holder (Barack Obama), and Mark Meadows, Bill Barr and Wilbur Ross (Donald Trump). The second rationale is that if the subjects of interviews with special counsels (or with DoJ employees in general) have reason to believe that the recordings of those interviews will be made public, they will be less forthcoming, and it will make future investigations harder to conduct.
These both seem entirely reasonable to us, although it's the second one that gets closer to the concern that surely looms largest in Joe Biden's mind. If House Republicans get their hands on those tapes, then it will be a matter of days (or maybe hours) until "someone" (ahem, Rep. James Comer, R-KY) leaks carefully edited selections to Sean Hannity or Laura Ingraham, selections designed to make Biden seem like a doddering old fool.
Johnson, on receiving the response from the DoJ, announced that he would file suit in federal court, with an eye toward forcing the White House to release the tapes. Good luck with that, Mike. Yes, everyone knows about Richard Nixon and HIS tapes that he was forced to turn over, but that was when an investigation was still underway, and when a special counsel was among the folks clamoring for the recordings. In Biden's case, the investigation is over and the special counsel has reached his conclusions. It is improbable that a court will decide that executive privilege does not apply here. And, in any case, with all the potential appeals involved, a resolution before the election is a longshot. In fact, a resolution before the election of 2028 is kind of a longshot.
Meanwhile, note the contradictory positions that the modern GOP finds itself in as part of its enabling of Trump. When he is the president in question, executive privilege is a magical power that allows him to do as he sees fit, even once he is out of office, like some sort of dictator-for-life. For Biden, executive privilege doesn't count, even while he's in office. Similarly, when it's Trump, he can do whatever he wants with classified documents, including hanging on to them after leaving office, and after being asked multiple time to return them. For Biden, on the other hand, retaining a vastly smaller number of documents, and outing himself voluntarily once the problem has been discovered, is a crime on par with the Jack the Ripper murders.
Anyhow, Biden, Garland, and the lawless, crime-enabling, deep-state Department of Justice will undoubtedly be a major talking point among Republican politicians and media outlets for the next couple of weeks, and probably for the rest of this election cycle. We don't think this will penetrate the minds of voters beyond the hard-right Trumpers, though, if only because there's so much "Biden crime family" stuff out there that it all kind of blends together, and turns into white noise. (Z)