The US House of Representatives will vote later on Wednesday over whether to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress.
America’s top law enforcement officer 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 the 81-year-old’s memory into question.
The vote’s likely outcome is not yet clear – but Republicans, who control the chamber by the narrowest of margins, have expressed confidence it will succeed.
Along partisan lines on Tuesday, the House Rules Committee advanced the contempt resolution to the full House.
On Wednesday morning Republicans crossed their final hurdle to the vote by a narrow 208-207 majority.
If the US attorney general is ultimately held in contempt, the House will recommend that the justice department makes a decision on whether or not to criminally prosecute him.
But Wednesday’s vote is likely a partisan exercise given that a justice department prosecutor would almost certainly not pursue criminal charges against the head of their agency.
Attorney Generals William Barr and Eric Holder, who respectively served the preceding Republican and Democratic administrations, were also held in contempt of Congress along partisan lines. Neither faced criminal charges.
The effort to hold Mr Garland in contempt stems from a 345-page report released by Special Counsel Robert Hur, 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.
He said 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”.
Mr Garland has provided congressional Republicans with a full transcript of the interview – but he has resisted Republican-issued subpoenas demanding audio recordings of the conversation.
On his advice, the president last month invoked executive privilege to block congressional Republicans from accessing tapes of the interview.
Mr Garland argued that turning them over could “chill cooperation with the department in future investigations”.
This week, Mr Garland wrote in a Washington Post opinion piece that “the Justice Department is under attack like never before”.
Ahead of Wednesday’s vote, Republicans argued he was hiding “the best evidence” of whether the president had committed a crime.
“It’s simple: Attorney General Garland holds information vital to the committee’s legislative oversight and the House’s impeachment inquiry [into Mr Biden],” Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said.
Democrats have, however, countered that interview transcripts are already publicly available. They claim critics of the president are “desperate” to prop up a flagging impeachment push and wish to wield selectively edited versions of the interview tapes against him.
“Unable to come up with any wrongdoing by the president, they have now trained their sights on the attorney general,” said Jerry Nadler, the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat.
“This isn’t really about a policy disagreement with the DOJ. This is about feeding the [Republican] base after 18 months of investigations that have produced failure after failure.”
Though several Republicans have expressed reservations about the contempt resolution, party leaders say they expect it to pass.
Their narrow majority, however, means they can afford few – if any – defections.
By BBC News
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