President Biden has asserted executive privilege to deny House Republicans access to recordings of his interview with a special counsel investigating his handling of government documents, Justice Department officials and the White House counsel said on Thursday.
The move is intended to shield Attorney General Merrick B. Garland from prosecution if House Republicans succeed in their effort to hold him in contempt for refusing to turn over audio of Mr. Biden’s conversations with the special counsel, Robert K. Hur, weeks after a nearly complete transcript of the interview was made public.
The move is certain to draw the ire of former President Donald J. Trump and his allies, but it is in keeping with the practice of his administration and that of his predecessor, President Barack Obama. The Justice Department cited executive privilege in opting not to pursue charges against two of Mr. Garland’s predecessors when they were held in contempt: Eric H. Holder Jr., a Democrat, in 2012 and William P. Barr, a Republican, in 2020.
“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 prosecuted for criminal contempt of Congress,” Carlos F. Uriarte, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, wrote in a letter to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, who leads the House Judiciary Committee, and Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, who leads the Oversight Committee.
Mr. Uriarte urged the committees to withdraw their contempt resolutions, citing the decision by the House members to forgo contempt proceedings in 2008 when President George W. Bush asserted executive privilege after his vice president, Dick Cheney, was subpoenaed.
“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,” the White House counsel Edward N. Siskel wrote in a letter to Mr. Jordan and Mr. Comer on Thursday, referring to Mr. Trump’s efforts to pressure department officials when he was president.
“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” he added.
Mr. Garland wrote in a letter to the president that Mr. Hur’s interviews with the president and his ghost writer “fall within the scope of executive privilege.”
Handing them over “would raise an unacceptable risk” of undermining “similar high-profile criminal investigations — in particular, investigations where the voluntary cooperation of White House officials is exceedingly important,” he said.
The move came hours before the Judiciary and Oversight Committees planned to hold sessions on Mr. Garland after he rejected their subpoenas for the recordings.
The contempt resolution would have to go to the full House for a vote. Approval is not certain, given Republicans’ narrow majority and intraparty divisions, congressional aides said.
Even if the measure passed, it would be little more than a symbolic gesture; the Biden administration would almost certainly decline to prosecute.
The move is part of a broader effort by Republican lawmakers to scrutinize Biden administration officials after failing to impeach Mr. Biden on behalf of Mr. Trump, who has been impeached twice and indicted four times.
Republicans are eager to make public the recording, which could provide damaging evidence of Mr. Hur’s characterization of the president as an “elderly man with a poor memory” and provide valuable fodder for Mr. Trump’s campaign.
Their fallback — a contempt vote — is intended to embarrass Mr. Garland by landing a glancing blow against the man Mr. Trump blames for a “witch hunt.”
In February, Mr. Hur, a former Justice Department official in the Trump administration, dropped a political bomb into the middle of the 2024 campaign, releasing a nearly 400-page final report summing up his investigation. The document is an excruciatingly detailed assessment of Mr. Biden’s faulty memory that overshadowed his conclusion: Mr. Biden, unlike Mr. Trump, should not face criminal charges.
The Republican argument for releasing the recording, laid out in the 12-page resolution under consideration on Thursday, represents a mash-up of motives and investigations.
Republicans argue that the audio is needed to resolve possible discrepancies between the transcript and recording. At various points, they say it would offer “unique and important information” that would aid in enacting change to future special counsel investigations, or allow them to get to the bottom of his family’s business dealings, even though that was never part of Mr. Hur’s investigation.
But mostly, they suggest that reading Mr. Biden’s words is not as good as hearing them.
The transcripts “do not reflect important verbal context, such as tone or tenor, or nonverbal context, such as pauses or pace of delivery,” committee staff members wrote.
In the past, Mr. Garland and other department officials have shown a willingness to defuse conflicts by reaching compromises with the House. Not this time.
In a sharply worded letter sent to Mr. Jordan and Mr. Comer earlier this month, an aide to Mr. Garland argued that turning over the audio would represent a dangerous precedent and give the legislative branch improper influence over executive branch law enforcement functions.
“It would be severely chilling if the decision to cooperate with a law enforcement investigation required individuals to submit themselves to public inquest by politicians,” Mr. Uriarte wrote.
Representative Glenn F. Ivey, Democrat of Maryland, who sits on the Judiciary Committee, accused Mr. Jordan of abusing his power — and imperiling future legislative oversight efforts.
“It’s purely political,” he said. “The only reason they want the recording is to try to use clips for campaign ads, or something along those lines, which obviously doesn’t meet the legislative purpose standard that the Supreme Court set for congressional oversight.”
Charlie Savage contributed reporting.