DOJ Won’t Prosecute AG Garland After House Republicans Vote to Hold Him in Contempt of Congress
AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana.
House Republicans’ attempts to prompt a criminal prosecution of President Joe Biden or a member of his administration fell short yet again Friday, when the Department of Justice sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) stating that it would not prosecute Attorney General Merrick Garland after the House voted to hold him in contempt of Congress.
The dispute between the attorney general and House GOP arose from Garland’s refusal to turn over the audio tapes of Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur. The interview was part of the investigation into the president’s handling of classified material, and Hur ultimately decided not to bring charges, angering the president’s critics.
The White House had asserted executive privilege over the recording of the interview, sending a letter to House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-KY) and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) arguing there was no “legitimate need” for ” such sensitive and constitutionally-protected law enforcement materials” to be released and Republicans clearly intended to “manipulate” them for “partisan political purposes.” According to the letter, Garland himself recommended to the president that he exert executive privilege over the recording because of his concern that other government officials would be less inclined to cooperate with investigations in the future.
In a House Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this month, Garland fired back at the Republicans for peddling “baseless and extremely dangerous falsehoods” and conspiracy theories that he argued were “an attack on the judicial process itself.”
Such arguments from Garland and others were unpersuasive for House Republicans, and on June 12 they voted to hold Garland in contempt, referring the matter to DOJ. The final vote was 216 to 207, mostly along party lines.
The ultimate decision on whether or not to prosecute Garland belonged to the DOJ, and Friday’s decision was not surprising. According to Bloomberg, the decision not to prosecute was announced to Johnson in a letter that stated, “The Department has determined that the responses by Attorney General Garland to the subpoenas issued by the Committees did not constitute a crime, and accordingly the Department will not bring the congressional contempt citation before a grand jury or take any other action to prosecute the Attorney General.”
Republicans have complained that two advisers to former President Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Peter Navarro, were prosecuted and convicted after they were held in contempt of Congress, but Garland and his allies have pointed to several critical differences, including the fact that Garland did not completely ignore the subpoena as Bannon and Navarro did. To the contrary, Garland provided the transcript of Biden’s interview with Hur and provided notice of the objection to releasing the audio transcript.
As a sitting U.S. president, Biden also had the right to exert executive privilege, a defense that both Bannon and Navarro failed to show applied in their situations.
In March, Navarro reported to a federal prison in Miami, Florida to begin serving his four-month sentence. Bannon has been ordered by a federal judge to report to prison by July 1 to begin his own four-month term of incarceration.
