President Joe Biden will assert executive privilege to keep audio and video recordings from his interview with special counsel Robert Hur private.
Hur recommended that no charges should be filed against Biden during the conclusion of his classified documents investigation of the president in February.
But the Justice Department official raised questions about Biden’s cognitive health and memory in his final report on Biden’s mishandling of sensitive materials during his time as vice president.
Hur concluded that although Biden was in his opinion guilty of having been loose with the country’s secrets, he believed a jury would be sympathetic to him, viewing him as an "elderly man with a poor memory."
Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and James Comer of Kentucky demanded the release of Hur’s interviews with Biden, but according to NBC News, the DOJ said Biden would invoke executive privilege to keep the recordings private in a Thursday letter.
🚨Wow
Joe Biden asserted executive privilege over the audio of his interview with the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents.
The same interview that led the special counsel to describe Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
What’s he hiding? pic.twitter.com/nFKQpUwYcd
— Steve Cortes (@CortesSteve) May 16, 2024
“It is the longstanding position of the executive branch held by administrations of both parties that an official who asserts the President’s claim of executive privilege cannot be prosecuted for criminal contempt of Congress," DOJ official Carlos Felipe Uriarte stated.
Additionally, Attorney General Merrick Garland stated separately that Biden’s conversations with Hur "fall within the scope of executive privilege.”
Garland added releasing the interviews "would raise an unacceptable risk of undermining the Department’s ability to conduct similar high-profile criminal investigations -- in particular, investigations where the voluntary cooperation of White House officials is exceedingly important.”
Hur’s Feb. 5 final report on Biden’s mishandling of classified materials was damaging politically for the president.
Hur opined that if Biden went to trial, he would “likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Hur continued: “Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt.
“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.”
Hur also said Biden’s memory had significantly declined in the years since he had earlier interviewed him in 2017.
The special counsel also claimed in the report that Biden could not recall the exact time frame when his son Beau Biden died from cancer.
According to Hur’s transcript, two people with Biden during an interview last year informed him Beau had passed away in 2015 from brain cancer.
"Was it 2015 he had died?” Biden asked, ABC News reported.
Another person with the president said, "It was May of 2015.”
