AG Garland contempt of US Congress vote on thin ice

The US House of Representatives is scheduled to vote on whether to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress.

But it remains unclear if Republicans, who control the chamber and are seeking to punish Mr Garland, actually have the votes to do it.

America's top prosecutor has refused to turn over interview tapes from a justice department probe of President Joe Biden's handling of classified documents.

A report on the inquiry had called Mr Biden's memory into question.

Mr Garland has already released full transcripts of the 81-year-old president's interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur and his team.

But he has resisted two Republican-issued subpoenas demanding audio recordings of the conversation, arguing that turning them over could “chill cooperation with the department in future investigations”.

Republicans have suggested he is "hiding" information relevant to their impeachment inquiry into Mr Biden, while Democrats have argued critics of the president seek to wield selectively edited versions of the tapes against him.

The effort to hold the US attorney general in contempt stems from a 345-page report released by Mr Hur in February, the result of a year-long inquiry into Mr Biden's retention of classified documents after leaving the vice-presidency.

Mr Biden served as vice-president from 2009 to 2017 in Barack Obama's administration.

Mr Hur concluded that no criminal charges were warranted, though Mr Biden appeared to have "willfully" retained classified materials as a private citizen.

The Garland-appointed prosecutor noted he believed prosecutors would struggle to secure a conviction against Mr Biden, as jurors would likely view him as a "well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory".

That characterisation came after the president sat for a five-hour interview, spanning across two days last October, with Mr Hur's team.

Its transcript shows that Mr Biden was unable to recall certain details relevant to the investigation, as well as milestones in his own life such as the years of his vice-presidency and when his oldest son Beau had died from cancer.

The report's release sparked a political firestorm, highlighting for critics one of the president's biggest weaknesses - voter concerns about his age and lucidity - in the midst of his bid for re-election.

Lawyers for Mr Biden disputed descriptions of the interview, accusing Mr Hur of using "highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events”.

But while the full interview transcript has been publicly available since March, the president - on Mr Garland's advice - last month invoked executive privilege to block congressional Republicans from accessing tapes of the interview.

This week, Mr Garland wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece that "the Justice Department is under attack like never before".

At a hearing on Tuesday, the Republican-led House Rules Committee advanced, along partisan lines, the effort to hold Mr Garland in contempt of Congress to a vote of the full House chamber.

"If the attorney general chooses to defy Congress and not produce the audio recording, he must face the consequences of his actions," James Comer, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told the panel.

But Jerry Nadler, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, pushed back that the contempt resolution "isn't really about a policy disagreement with the DOJ".

"This is about feeding the [Make America Great Again] base after 18 months of investigations that have produced failure after failure."

In the hour preceding Wednesday's vote, it was unclear if Republicans could find a majority in favour of holding Mr Garland in contempt - though party leaders expressed confidence at a morning news conference that they would.

Republicans' narrow majority in the House means that just three defectors could kill the contempt resolution. Several members have already expressed reservations.

Even if Mr Garland is held in contempt, there is no chance he will be referred for criminal prosecution.

His predecessors William Barr, who served in the Trump administration, and Eric Holder, who led President Barack Obama's justice department, were both held in contempt in similarly partisan endeavours. Neither ultimately faced indictment.