DOJ won’t prosecute Merrick Garland after Republicans vote to hold him in contempt

The Department of Justice will not pursue a criminal case against Attorney General Merrick Garland after House Republicans voted to hold him in contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena for audio tapes from an interview with President Joe Biden.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives voted 216 to 207 to hold Garland in contempt, with only one Republican joining Democratic members in opposition, marking the House GOP’s latest move in a flailing investigation into the president and his administration.

Garland’s responses to subpoenas issued by GOP-controlled committees – which called on the attorney general to release audio recordings from Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur – “did not constitute a crime,” the Justice Department wrote on Friday.

The department’s decision effectively closes that case.

In his letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday, Assistant Attorney General Carlos Felipe Uriarte stated the president had asserted executive privilege over the tapes, and that the decision was in line with how the Justice Department handled contempt resolutions against Garland’s predecessors.

“Consistent with this longstanding position and uniform practice, 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 further,” Uriarte wrote.

In a statement earlier this week, Garland said it was “deeply disappointing” the House turned a “serious congressional authority into a partisan weapon.”

The vote “disregards the constitutional separation of powers, the Justice Department’s need to protect its investigations and the substantial amount of information we have provided to the Committees,” he added.

House Republicans already have transcripts of the interview, which is also publicly available.

According to a memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, “because the committees have the transcripts of the special counsel’s interviews, the needs the committees have articulated for the recordings are plainly insufficient to overcome a privilege claim grounded in these important separation of powers concerns.”

“The audio recording will not reveal any information relevant to the committees’ stated needs that is not available in the transcripts,” the memo reads.

Republicans voted overwhelmingly late last year to launch an impeachment inquiry against the president, largely, at Donald Trump’s request.

“They’re all part of a cult and they just try to please the leader of the cult Donald Trump,” according to Democratic Representative Jim McGovern, the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee.

McGovern also noted that House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan did not comply with a congressional subpoena related to a select committee’s investigation into January 6 and the attack on the Capitol.

House Oversight Committee chair James Comer denied that the vote against Garland had anything to do with Trump’s visit to the Capitol this week.

“The Democrats continue to prove they’re not serious about oversight or accountability,” he told The Independent.

Additional reporting by Eric Garica