Republicans in the House are requesting that the Department of Justice (DOJ) turn over any records pertaining to Special Counsel Robert Hur’s probe into President Joe Biden’s purported misuse of classified information. They intend to analyze the data to decide if the House should move to impeach the president, per a memo addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland on February 27.
The Ways and Means Committee is working in tandem with the Oversight and Judiciary Committees.
The request’s committee is particularly seeking documents from Hur’s one-on-one sessions with the president and Mark Zwonitzer, his personal scribe. They’ve also requested that the DOJ provide records pertaining to a phone conversation that Biden had with Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the prime minister of Ukraine, in December 2015.
House Republicans on Tuesday subpoenaed the Justice Department for materials related to special counsel Robert Hur's investigation into President Biden's handling of classified documents. https://t.co/cyZkMKvMRJ
— CBS News (@CBSNews) February 27, 2024
According to reports, this subpoena corresponds with a previous request made on February 12 for the same data. The Justice Department has now been criticized by Republican senators of not providing enough information by the request’s original deadline.
Republican members of the House say they also want to know more about the president’s contacts with high-ranking officials in Ukraine, such as Yatsenuk. They wonder if the details could provide insight into his family’s economic activities in the other nation.
After the president’s personal attorneys found some secret documents at his Delaware home and private office, the special counsel’s inquiry got underway in January 2023. In a swift response, Attorney General Merrick Garland designated Hur to determine how the documents got there and whether Biden broke any laws.
On February 5, Hur’s research came to an end. The special counsel concluded that, after leaving office in 2017, then-VP Biden did, in fact, “willfully” retain and mishandle some classified materials, especially those pertaining to military operations in Afghanistan. Hur, however, deemed it “unwarranted” to press charges against Biden, presenting him as a kind and “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”
Hur’s description of Biden’s memory problems was quickly refuted by the Biden team. Hur received a letter from White House attorney Richard Sauber along with his final report, in which Sauber called the depiction “highly inappropriate” and the language profoundly discriminatory. The relevance of Biden’s inability to recall “years-old events” was also downplayed by Sauber, who described witnesses’ memory gaps as common.
The subpoena supposedly gives Garland until March 7 to reply. Hur, though, has already been set to appear on March 12 before Congress regarding the investigation.
