Republicans Vote To Advance Contempt For AG Garland, Because Executive Privilege Is… Bad Now?

If it wasn’t for bad faith …
The post Republicans Vote To Advance Contempt For AG Garland, Because Executive Privilege Is… Bad Now? appeared first on Above the Law.

Late last night, Republicans on the House Judiciary and Oversight Committees voted to advance a resolution holding Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress. The hearing was originally scheduled to take place in the morning, but was moved to 8 p.m. to allow several members to attend Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan and scream inanities in front of the courthouse.

Perhaps the late hour accounts for a distinct punchiness among the members, who got a bit testy as the evening wore on. Or perhaps it was the craven wankery of the entire exercise.

Oversight Chair James Comer has been vowing to get the “Biden crime family” since Republicans took back the gavel in 2022, but has so far come up short. All his smoking gun witnesses keep turning out to be criminals. Annoying!

So instead he’s going after AG Garland for thwarting the impeachment investigation by … allowing Special Counsel Robert Hur to finish his investigation of President Biden’s retention of classified documents, release his 354-page report unredacted, testify before Congress for hours, and release the unredacted transcript of the voluntary interview Biden and his biographer did with Hur.

But, he refused to release the audiotape of that interview, and this aggression will not stand, man.

The audio recordings of Special Counsel Hur’s interviews of President Biden and Zwonitzer are of superior evidentiary value regarding the specific issues the Committees are investigating. While the text of the Department-created transcripts purport to reflect the words uttered during these interviews, they do not reflect important verbal context, such as tone or tenor, or nonverbal context, such as pauses or pace of delivery. For instance, when interviewed, a subject’s pauses and inflections can provide indications of a witness’s ability to recall events, or whether the individual is intentionally giving evasive or nonresponsive testimony to investigators. The verbal nuances in President Biden’s answers about his mishandling of classified information would assist the Committees’ inquiry into whether he abused his office of public trust for his family’s financial gain. In short, the audio recordings would offer unique and important information to advance the Committees’ impeachment inquiry.

The resolution noted that the AG had “invoked no constitutional or legal privilege relieving his obligation to fully respond to the Committees’ subpoenas.” But yesterday the administration did invoke executive privilege with respect to the recording.

“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,” White House Counsel Edward Siskel wrote to Comer and Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan. “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.”

In an oblique reference to Wednesday’s hearing of the Judiciary subcommittee to attack the New York criminal case, Siskel noted that these “subpoenas and contempt threats come in the wake of the Committees’ efforts to go after prosecutors you do not like, attack witnesses in cases you disapprove of, and demand information from ongoing investigations and prosecutions, despite longstanding norms that these law enforcement processes should be allowed to play out free from such political interference.”

He also pointed to a letter from Attorney General Michael Mukasey urging George W. Bush to assert executive privilege to block congressional subpoenas for documents and testimony regarding Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation of the outing of CIA operative Valerie Plame by, among others, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff Scooter Libby. Mukasey opined that disclosing the information would “chill deliberations among future White House officials and impede future Department of Justice criminal investigations involving official White House conduct.”

But Siskel needn’t have gone back 16 years to find precedent for invoking privilege. Trump himself famously resisted all congressional subpoenas once Democrats took back the House in 2018, and even announced it as White House policy when Democrats refused to drop their impeachment inquiry in 2020.

But clanging hypocrisy is kind of Trump’s brand. And so his spokesweirdo Steven Cheung duly blasted out a statement declaring the former president shocked and appalled that Biden would assert executive privilege while refusing to allow an ex-president to use it to thwart a criminal investigation.

“Crooked Joe Biden and his feeble administration have irretrievably politicized the key constitutional tenet of executive privilege, denying it to their political opponents while aggressively trying to use it to run political cover for Crooked Joe,” he huffed.

Meanwhile back in Congress, Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz was doing what he does best: spanking the hapless Committee chair — this time for a boneheaded fundraising appeal promising yet again to GET BIDEN if his followers will only kick up more cash.

American democracy, FTW.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.