Meanwhile, the DOJ ordered Steve Bannon to report to prison July 1 for defying the illegitimate House Jan. 6 Committee’s subpoena.
The Justice Department on Friday declined to prosecute Attorney General Merrick Garland following a vote by the House to hold him in contempt for refusing to turn over audio recordings of Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur.
Assistant Attorney General Carlos Felipe sent a letter to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) explaining that Joe Biden had “asserted executive privilege and directed” Garland not to “release materials” subpoenaed by the House Oversight and Accountability Committee.
“That directive was based on a legal opinion from the Department of Justice (Department) advising that asserting privilege would be legally proper,” the DOJ wrote.
“The President’s directive was issued after the Department produced materials responsive to all four requests in the Committee’s subpoenas. The Department provided Special Counsel Hur’s report without any additional redactions and facilitated his congressional testimony.”
“The Department has determined that the responses by Attorney General Garland to the subpoenas issued by the Committees did not constitute a crime, and accordingly the Department will not bring the congressional contempt citation before a grand jury or take any other action to prosecute the Attorney General,” the DOJ’s letter added.
The House voted 216 to 207 on Wednesday hold Garland in contempt of Congress for not complying with subpoenas for “records, including transcripts, notes, video, and audio files,” relating to Hur’s investigation of Biden’s “willful mishandling of classified information,” the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability stated in a press release.
Hur declined to prosecute Biden for unlawfully retaining classified documents in part because he believed a jury would perceive Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
The Committee then requested the audio tapes of Hur’s interview with Biden after Garland “only provided written transcripts” that were deemed “insufficient.”
The DOJ’s refusal to prosecute Garland for defying a subpoena comes as President Trump’s former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon had been ordered to report to prison on July 1 for a four-month sentence after he defied a subpoena from the Democrat-run House January 6 Committee.