The White House blocked the release of the audio of President Joe Biden's interview with the special counsel over his handling of classified documents, claiming that House Republicans want to use the remarks for "partisan political purposes," according to a report.
The clash between the Republicans and the White House over the audio is at the center of the GOP's move to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress.
"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," White House counsel Ed Siskel wrote to House Republicans ahead of scheduled votes by two House committees to refer Garland to the Justice Department for the contempt charges, the Associated Press reported Thursday.
"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 continued.
In a separate letter released Thursday, Garland advised Biden that the audio falls within the guidelines of executive privilege, which protects a president's ability to get candid counsel from his advisers without public exposure.
"There have been a series of unprecedented and frankly unfounded attacks on the Justice Department," Garland said, the AP reported. "This request, this effort to use contempt as a method of obtaining our sensitive law enforcement files is just most recent."
In the letter, Garland said that the lawmakers' attempts "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."
Biden's interview with special counsel Robert Hur sparked controversy when Hur wrote in his report that it would be difficult to prove to a jury that the president retained the classified documents willfully.
He mentioned Biden's age, 81, and memory as factors in his decision.
"Mr. 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," Hur wrote in his report.
