President Joe Biden and his White House refuse to say whether he would agree to speak with special counsel Robert Hur if the prosecutor asks to interview him about the mishandling of classified information.
Attorney General Merrick Garland selected Hur to investigate the classified documents on Jan. 12. Biden’s personal attorneys said they first discovered classified documents in early November at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C. The president’s lawyers have since found more classified documents at Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, home in December and January, and the DOJ found more when it conducted its own search earlier this month.
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Biden was asked by a reporter on Monday whether the president would give testimony to the special counsel if the Garland-appointed prosecutor wants to speak with him, but Biden blew off the question, saying: “Oh, I don’t even know about the special counsel.”
Biden ignored a reporter’s question about whether he would commit to meet with the special counsel during a Jan. 17 press scrum at the White House after a photo-op with Netherlands Prime Minister Mark Rutte in the Oval Office. That afternoon, the Biden White House made it official that it would not be saying whether Biden would be willing to speak with Hur during the special counsel’s investigation.
Biden’s dodging of the question follows a similar pattern established by other White House officials in recent weeks.
When White House spokesman Ian Sams was asked if the president would sit for an interview with the special counsel if Hur requested it, he also avoided answering.
“We’re not going to get ahead of that process with the special counsel and speculate on what they may or may not want or ask for,” Sams said. “And so, I’m just not going to comment on that at this time and would refer you over to DOJ on their process and their thinking in terms of how to conduct their own investigation.”
In the midst of special counsel Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation in February 2018, Biden said he didn’t think that then-President Donald Trump should agree to sit down with Mueller.
“If I were the president’s lawyer, I would probably tell him not to sit down with the special counsel,” Biden told Chris Cuomo on CNN. “You’re in a situation where the president has some difficulty with precision.” Biden laughed and said, “And one of the things that I would worry about if I were his lawyer is him saying something that was simply not true without him even planning to be disingenuous. … I just marvel at some of the things he says and does.”
The latest developments come after Carlos Uriarte, the assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s office of legislative affairs, sent a letter on Monday to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), pointing to Hur’s appointment as the key reason why the DOJ was limiting its sharing of information on the Biden saga.
Jordan fired off a letter to Garland on Jan. 13 demanding all documents and communications involving the DOJ, the FBI, and the Executive Office of the President about Biden’s classified documents, but the DOJ response largely denied the Ohio Republican’s information requests.
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The White House, the National Archives, and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines have all also pointed to the appointment of special counsels in the Trump and Biden sagas as reasons for missing deadlines or deflecting questions, and the DOJ has now confirmed its special counsel justification for delays in info sharing.
Uriarte sent a similar letter on Saturday to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-VA) and its Vice Chairman Marco Rubio (R-FL), citing Garland’s appointments of Smith and Hur as a reason why the DOJ was limiting the intelligence community’s sharing of information on these matters.
