Three Republican House committee leaders sent a letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday requesting Attorney General Merrick Garland to provide their committees with the full transcripts and any recordings of President Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur about his mishandling of classified documents. They also requested the Counsel’s report relating to then-Vice President Biden’s December 2015 phone call with the then-Ukrainian prime minister.
In the letter, Representatives James Comer (R-Ky.), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), and Jason Smith (R-Mo.), who lead the House Oversight, Judiciary, and Ways and Means Committees, wrote Garland that they “are investigating whether sufficient grounds exist to draft articles of impeachment against President Biden for consideration by the full House.”
The request follows last week’s report released by Special Counsel Hur after months of investigation into Biden’s mishandling of classified documents. According to Fox News, “Hur described President Biden as a ‘sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,’ and said he would bring no criminal charges against the president after a months-long investigation into his improper retention of classified documents related to national security.”
Citing the day Hur’s report was made public, the committee’s letter stated:
President Biden held a press conference in which he delivered remarks and answered questions from reporters. The President stated, “I’ve seen the headlines since the report was released about my willful retention of documents. These assertions are not only misleading, they’re just plain wrong.” In response to a question regarding sharing classified information with his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer — a fact documented in Mr. Hur’s report — the President claimed, “I did not share classified information, I did not share it.” This assertion appears to be false. Thus, mere hours after the release of Mr. Hur’s report, the President appears to have inaccurately contradicted key facts about its contents.
Key to the committees’ request, they shared in the letter that “throughout Mr. Hur’s report, there is reference to a transcript of an interview conducted with President Biden on October 8 and October 9, 2023.” The committees are seeking a full transcript and any other records of this interview.
The letter continued:
As explained to Mr. Hur in October, there is concern that President Biden may have retained sensitive documents related to specific countries involving his family’s foreign business dealings. Further, we seek to understand whether the White House or President Biden’s personal attorneys placed any limitations or scoping restrictions during the interview that would have precluded a line of inquiry regarding evidence (emails, text messages, or witness statements) directly linking the President to troublesome foreign payments.
The Judiciary Committee is requiring these documents, according to the letter, “for its ongoing oversight of the Department’s commitment to impartial justice and its handling of the investigation and prosecution of President Biden’s presumptive opponent, Donald J. Trump, in the November 2024 presidential election,” adding, “despite clear evidence the President willfully retained and transmitted classified materials.”
Hur’s recommendation “that no criminal charges are warranted” citing Biden’s poor memory that could pose challenges to proving the president’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, most certainly will make pursuing a successful impeachment inquiry more difficult.
Biden’s failing mental agility was clearly exposed by Hur’s report, as Fox shared:
“Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone from whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt,” the report states. “It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him — by then a former president well into his eighties — of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Biden’s “memory also appeared to have significant limitations” according to the report, and during conversations with his ghostwriter, recorded in 2017, his conversations were “painfully slow, with Mr. Biden struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries”
The letter closed by requesting the DOJ produce the required information as soon as possible, but no than February 19, adding that “given the seriousness of these matters, the Committees are prepared to compel the production of this material if necessary.”
