House Republicans’ investigations into President Joe Biden and his family won’t stop when he leaves office under new rules legislation up for a vote this week in the House.
The rules for the 119th Congress, which will be approved by lawmakers after they are sworn in Friday, will authorize the House Judiciary Committee to issue a number of subpoenas for interviews that were thwarted when Biden was in office. Among those is a subpoena for Attorney General Merrick Garland related to special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents while he was vice president.
The Judiciary Committee sought to hold Garland in contempt of Congress last year for withholding interview tapes between Hur and Biden’s memoir ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer, but that effort was blocked after Biden asserted executive privilege over the materials. Garland requested Biden to assert his privilege, arguing the committee’s request was “plainly insufficient to outweigh the deleterious effects that production of the recordings would have on the integrity and effectiveness of similar law enforcement investigations in the future.”
However, Republicans argued the tapes were necessary because Hur’s report “unequivocally stated” that Biden disclosed classified information to his ghostwriter “nearly verbatim, sometimes for an hour or more at a time” and “at least three times” during those interviews.