The Republican majority under House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana failed to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress on Thursday.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., introduced the resolution to hold Garland in “inherent contempt” over the attorney general’s refusal to release audio tapes of President Joe Biden’s interviews with Special Counsel Robert Hur. Luna released a statement immediately after the vote to announce she refiled the motion to fine Garland $10,000 per day until the tapes are made public.
“Today’s vote on my inherent contempt resolution and the legislative appropriations bill did not pass due to some Republican absences,” Luna said. “I have refiled the resolution and will be calling it up again in a couple of weeks when Congress is back in session and Members return.”
The contempt vote failed 204 to 210, with four Republicans voting with Democrats against the resolution. Those Republicans were Reps. Tom McClintock and John Duarte of California, and Mike Turner and David Joyce of Ohio.
Rep. Brian Mast of Florida wrote on X that he missed the vote to attend his father’s funeral. “Otherwise, I would have voted to hold Merrick Garland in inherent contempt of Congress,” Mast wrote.
In February, Hur wrapped up a federal investigation into the president’s mishandling of classified material by concluding the 81-year-old commander-in-chief was too senile to face felony charges.
“Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt,” Hur’s team wrote in the nearly 400-page report. “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.”
Biden apparently struggled to recall when he was vice president, forgot the timeline of his son’s death “even within several years,” and had a “hazy” recollection “when describing the Afghanistan debate that was once so important to him.”
More lapses in the president’s memory were on display at the snap-White House press conference delivered upon the Hur report’s immediate release when Biden accused the special counsel of raising the topic of Beau Biden’s death.
“How in the hell dare he raise that?” Biden said in an angry tirade. The transcripts, however, show Biden was the one who brought up the topic.
While the transcripts of the president’s October interviews with Hur have been made public, the audio recordings remain concealed by the Department of Justice. House Republicans on the Judiciary Committee under Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, sued the department last week to compel the agency’s release of the audio.
Biden’s cognitive decline was put on public display last month in CNN’s televised debate between the White House incumbent and former President Donald Trump. Biden appeared frail and forgetful on stage and said later at a campaign fundraiser that he “almost fell asleep” during the primetime event.
The catastrophic performance from the president triggered a panic among many within the Democrat Party to replace the presumptive nominee just months before the November election. On Thursday, Axios reported Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York is now “open to dumping Biden in 2024.”
“In public, Schumer has been insistent that he is ‘for Joe.’ In private, he’s singing a different tune,” Axios reported. “The majority leader is one of several Democrats, including former President Obama and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has the political and personal standing to convince Biden to step aside. Even so, Biden can still dig in and the delegates are pledged to him.”
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