According to left-wing prosecutors, the liberal media, and the Democratic Party, Donald Trump illegally tried to influence the 2016 presidential election by preventing damaging stories about him from becoming public.
In their view, that is a crime.
Based on this stellar legal theory, Joe Biden is committing the very same crime right now because he is asserting executive privilege over the recording of his interview with special counsel Robert Hur.
House Republicans are threatening to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt for refusing to turn over the audio.
Garland advised Biden in a letter on Thursday that the audio falls within the scope of executive privilege. Garland told the Democratic president that the “committee’s needs are plainly insufficient to outweigh the deleterious effects that the production of the recordings would have on the integrity and effectiveness of similar law enforcement investigations in the future.”
Assistant Attorney General Carlos Felipe Uriarte urged lawmakers not to proceed with the contempt effort to avoid “unnecessary and unwarranted conflict.”
“It is the longstanding position of the executive branch held by administrations of both parties that an official who asserts the president’s claim of executive privilege cannot be held in contempt of Congress,” Uriarte wrote.
White House Counsel Ed Siskel wrote in a separate, scathing letter to Congress on Thursday that lawmakers’ effort to obtain the recording was absent any legitimate purpose and lays bare their likely goal — “to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes.”
It's understandable why the White House doesn't want the audio released. The transcript alone was quite damning. I don't doubt that the audio is worse.
Related: Biden Administration Is Now Under Investigation for 'Election Interference'
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". It determined 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."
Recommended: Karine Jean-Pierre May Have Admitted Too Much About Trump's Trial
Thus, it would be "difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him [...] of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.” It also pointed out that he couldn’t remember the years he was vice president or when his son Beau died.
But Siskel's explanation for the refusal to release the audio is indisputably an admission that the White House is motivated by protecting Biden from a damaging story in an election year, and that, according to the left, is a crime.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member