American President Joe Biden announced Thursday that he refused to provide his Republican opponents in Congress with the recording of his testimony before a special prosecutor, which had provoked, particularly among his opponents, a deluge of comments on memory and the mental agility of the 81-year-old American president.
Special prosecutor Robert Hur recommended in his 388-page report in February that Joe Biden be dismissed in a case of withholding confidential documents. But he mentioned an “elderly man with a bad memory”, comments deemed “inappropriate” by the White House.
Since then, in the middle of an election year which will see Mr. Biden face Donald Trump once again in November, two committees of the House of Representatives controlled by Republicans have demanded that the recording be provided to them, and not just the transcripts.
On the recommendation of his Justice Secretary, Merrick Garland, Mr. Biden invoked his “prerogatives as chief executive” to reject this request, wrote to the Republican chairs of these committees, the White House legal adviser, Ed Siskel, and the Department of Justice.
“The lack of a legitimate need to request these audio recordings exposes your likely goal: to sausage them, distort them, and use them for partisan purposes,” Ed Siskel wrote to the chairs of the two committees, Jim Jordan and James Comer.
Mr. Garland, for his part, justified his recommendation by the need to ensure the cooperation of future senior executive officials in future similar investigations.
“We have gone extraordinarily far to ensure that the committees’ legitimate requests are met, but this is not one of them,” he told reporters at a Justice Department briefing.
Obstruction
Granting this request would have “harmed our ability in the future to conduct sensitive investigations”, he argued, deploring the stated desire of the two parliamentary committees to find him guilty of obstructing the investigative powers of the Congress, for its opposition to the release of the recordings.
One of these committees, that of Judicial Affairs, adopted a resolution to this effect on Thursday. But in the absence of action on the part of the Department of Justice, this procedure should not lead to criminal proceedings.
“To determine whether the special counsel acted in accordance with justice in not prosecuting — in not recommending the prosecution of — the President, the records are necessary,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan said.
“Frankly, the transcripts alone are not sufficient evidence of the state of the president’s memory, because the White House has altered transcripts in the past,” he said.
Appointed in January 2023 by Mr. Garland, the special prosecutor concluded in his report that Joe Biden had “knowingly kept and disclosed classified documents after his vice-presidency while he was a private citizen”.
But he considered that “an indictment would not be justified”, believing in particular that a jury would give the benefit of the doubt to “a sympathetic, well-intentioned elderly man with a bad memory”. According to him, at one point in the interview, Joe Biden no longer remembered the year his eldest son, Beau, died.
The Democratic camp denounced “gratuitous” comments with “political motivations” but their Republican opponents in the House of Representatives immediately exploited the report to consider that Joe Biden was “unfit” to exercise his functions.
During a hearing in March before these two committees of the House of Representatives, Robert Hur justified his comments on his memory.
“I did not sanitize my explanation, nor unfairly denigrate the president,” he assured.
The appointment of the special prosecutor followed the discovery of classified documents dating from the time when Joe Biden was vice-president (2009-2017), in particular on the American military engagement in Afghanistan, in his residence in Wilmington, in the Delaware (east), as well as in a former office.