Joe Biden yesterday blocked the publication of audio recordings of his interviews with the special prosecutor who investigated his handling of classified documents, Robert Hur. A group of House Republicans had asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to release the tapes, in which Biden shows a “significantly limited memory”, makes a series of lapses and gets confused about relevant facts in his biography , as the date his son Beau died.
In a letter sent to Republican lawmakers James Comer and Jim Jordan, the White House confirmed that Biden had invoked his executive privilege to prevent its publication. Their argument is that the Republicans wanted to access them “to cut them” and use them for political purposes. “The absence of a legitimate need exposes their goal: to cut them, distort them and use them for partisan purposes,” wrote a White House lawyer, Ed Siskel, in the letter to Republicans . “Requiring the executive branch to use such sensitive and constitutionally protected materials because they want to manipulate them for political gain is inappropriate,” added Siskel.
Biden’s decision affects an explosive report released in February by special counsel Hur, who oversaw the investigation into the president’s handling of classified materials found in his private residences and offices. The dozens of documents, which Biden took from the White House during his years as Barack Obama’s vice president, were found last year as part of an operation in which Biden “collaborated throughout ” with justice, according to the prosecutor.
The report pointed to no liability for Biden, in part because Hur said it would have been difficult to convince a jury to indict a man “in his eighties” who allegedly committed a crime that “requires a mental state of voluntariness”. “At trial, Biden probably presented himself to a jury, as he did during our interview, as an understanding, well-intentioned older man with a bad memory,” he said.
In his conclusions, Hur pointed out that, in the two-day statement, the president demonstrated “serious limitations” of his memory, since he “did not remember when he had been vice-president”. And he added that “his memory seemed confused when he described the debate about Afghanistan, which had been so important to him.”
These claims were a blow against the president, unpopular due to his advanced age, as they portrayed him as a worn-out octogenarian. Now the Republicans want to touch the wound and try as hard as they can to make the recordings reach the public. However, Biden was able to avoid this by using executive privilege, which protects confidential communications related to official responsibilities.
