The House Judiciary Committee is suing Attorney General Garland after the nation’s top law enforcement officer refused to turn over the audio tapes of President Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur, who investigated the president and found that he improperly retained classified information after leaving the vice presidency in 2017. Mr. Garland has already been held in contempt of Congress for not delivering the recordings to Congress. 

The Judiciary Committee, led by Congressman Jim Jordan, filed its lawsuit in the federal district court at the District of Columbia. “This dispute is principally about a frivolous assertion of executive privilege,” the committee writes. “Audio recordings are better evidence than transcripts of what happened during the Special Counsel’s interviews with President Biden and Mr. Zwonitzer,” they continue, referring to the president’s ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, who was also interviewed by Mr. Hur and whose audio tapes have also not been given to the panel. 

Mr. Hur wrote in his final report that the president likely broke the law, but should not be prosecuted because Mr. Biden could convince a jury that he was nothing more than “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” who took the documents and shared them with Mr. Zwonitzer absent-mindedly. According to the report, Mr. Biden shared with Mr. Zwonitzer classified documents related to Obama-era Afghanistan policies as part of writing his 2017 memoir, “Promise Me, Dad.”

Mr. Biden disagreed with President Obama during those deliberations about what to do in the country, and Mr. Hur concluded that Mr. Biden retained the documents because he believed that they could exonerate his policy positions. 

The Judiciary Committee already has access to publicly available transcripts of the interviews, though they say they need to hear the audio because there are parts of the transcript labeled “unintelligible.” 

“That verbal and nonverbal context is quite important here because the Special Counsel relied on the way that President Biden presented himself during their interview — ‘as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory’ — when ultimately recommending that President Biden should not be prosecuted for unlawfully retaining and disclosing classified information,” the committee writes in its lawsuit. “The audio recordings, not the cold transcripts, are the best available evidence of how President Biden presented himself during the interview.”

Mr. Garland was held in contempt of Congress after he refused to comply with a subpoena from the committee demanding he turn over the audio recordings.