The vote followed demands that the US attorney general turn over recordings of President Biden’s interviews with Robert Hur.
Attorney General Merrick Garland is sworn in as he testifies during a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the Department of Justice, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, June 4, 2024.
(Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via Getty Images)
As of yesterday, US Attorney General Merrick Garland can add a new credential to his CV: the first federal official to be found in contempt of Congress for platform agnosticism. Garland has refused to supply Ohio GOP Representative Jim Jordan’s Judiciary Committee with the audio recordings of special counsel Robert Hur’s five-hour interview with President Joe Biden in the probe of Biden’s alleged misuse of classified documents relating to his vice presidency as he began to research a book. After complying with Congress’s request for information, the attorney general failed to grace them with sounds—or rather, the absence of them: the interspersed silences, stammers, and aporias that could deliver an audio picture of President Joe Biden wrestling with an overtaxed memory and cognitive distress.
The committee had already hosted Hur himself to explain his decision not to pursue charges against Biden, along with soliciting his impressions of Biden’s failing memory. And Garland had also agreed to furnish Jordan’s panel with a full transcript of the Biden interview. But with other fronts in Congress’s great rolling inquisition against the “Biden crime family” indefinitely stalled, and its marquee event—the long-touted Biden impeachment proceedings—likewise in evidence-challenged limbo, the MAGA-lubricated machinery of legislative inquiry has gone into gnat-straining overdrive.
Not content with Garland’s own five-hour grilling before Jordan’s panel last week, House GOP leaders have set upon the Hur recordings as though they were a mystic healing relic, possessing the power to dispel the many recent embarrassments the justice system has visited on the Trump movement and its maximum leader—or, failing that, to at least make them appear like serious lawmakers for a fleeting moment or two before the chamber hurriedly adjourned in time for the annual congressional baseball game.
The vote broke down on party lines, 216-207, with Jordan’s Ohio colleague David Joyce the lone GOP vote against the resolution. In the coming weeks, House Speaker Mike Johnson will certify the contempt report to the US Attorney for the District of Columbia, who is supposed to bring the finding before a grand jury for resolution. The Department of Justice—yes, the agency that the alleged offender himself directs—will make a separate determination about whether to pursue a prosecution of Garland.
Surely, even the notoriously buttoned-down and methodical Garland—who was once refused even a hearing on his 2016 nomination to the US Supreme Court thanks to the bullshit power chicanery of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell—has to savor the many gruesome ironies on display here. For starters, of course, Jordan himself has for nearly two years been in contempt of a congressional subpoena to appear before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the US Capitol.