On Thursday morning, Joe Biden officially asserted executive privilege over the audio recordings of his interviews with former Special Counsel Robert Hur. It was a surprising move for a lot of reasons. For starters, the transcript of those interviews has been out there for months. We know what he said. We know he couldn't remember when he was vice president or when his son Beau died. Those details aren't up for debate.
Yet by claiming executive privilege, Biden and his team at the White House conceded just how damaging the interviews truly are and that the audio is likely worse than the transcript indicates.
In a letter to Congress, White House Counsel Ed Siskel essentially admitted that the reason for asserting privilege was pure politics. “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," he claimed. “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."
Not even Biden's allies in the media are buying it. As the House Oversight Committee notes, "there are multiple news outlets suing the DOJ under FOIA to get ahold of the audio from President Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Hur," including, ABC, the Associated Press, Bloomberg, CBS, CNN, WSJ, NBC, Reuters, the Washington Post, and Univision.
With that many media outlets wanting access to the audio, Biden's executive privilege claim isn't likely to get a lot of sympathy. If he eventually relents, it will only make the contents of the audio that much more problematic for him because the media will quickly frame the narrative as "the audio that Joe Biden didn't want you to hear."
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“It’s a five-alarm fire at the White House. Clearly, President Biden and his advisors fear releasing the audio recordings of his interview because it will again reaffirm to the American people that President Biden’s mental state is in decline. The House Oversight Committee requires these recordings as part of our investigation of President Biden’s mishandling of classified documents," Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) said in a statement. "The White House is asserting executive privilege over the recordings, but it has already waived privilege by releasing the transcript of the interview. Today’s Hail Mary from the White House changes nothing for our committee. The House Oversight Committee will move forward with its markup of a resolution and report recommending to the House of Representatives that Attorney General Garland be held in contempt of Congress for defying a lawful subpoena.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) agreed.
“President Biden is apparently afraid for the citizens of this country and everyone to hear those tapes. They obviously confirm what special counsel is about and would likely cause, I suppose, in his estimation, such alarm with the American people that the President is using all of his power to suppress their release,” he told reporters on Thursday.
.@SpeakerJohnson: "President Biden has invoked executive privilege to prevent the American people from hearing the audio recordings of his testimony with Special Council Robert Hur...President Biden is using his authority to defend himself politically." pic.twitter.com/j8Do5GKW8Q
— CSPAN (@cspan) May 16, 2024
In February, Hur's report concluded that Biden "willfully retained and disclosed classified materials after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen" and that his actions "present[ed] serious risks to national security.” However, the Hur report also assessed that Biden's memory was "significantly limited, both during his recorded interviews with the ghostwriter in 2017 and in his interview with our office in 2023."
Hur determined that it wasn't worth bringing him to trial over his mishandling of classified documents because Biden "would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."
Biden's efforts to block the audio have now only brought renewed attention to it, and it's not going away anytime soon.
