Biden asserts executive privilege over recordings from classified documents probe

The White House asserted executive privilege over audio and video recordings related to Special Counsel Robert Hur's interviews with President Biden.

"I write to inform you that the President has asserted executive privilege over the requested audio recordings and is making a protective assertion of privilege over any remaining materials responsive to the subpoenas that have not already been produced," Associate Attorney General Carlos Uriarte wrote in a letter Thursday to Reps. Jim Jordan and James Comer, chairmen of the Committee on the Judiciary and Committee on Oversight and Accountability, respectively.

"It is the longstanding position of the executive branch held by administrations of both parties that an official who asserts the President’s claim of executive privilege cannot be prosecuted for criminal contempt of Congress."

Hur led the investigation into Biden's handling of classified documents following his departure as vice president under the Obama administration. Hur announced in February that he would not recommend criminal charges against Biden for possessing classified materials after his vice presidency, citing that Biden is "a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory."

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"Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone from whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. 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," Hur wrote in his report.

The findings sparked widespread outrage that Biden was effectively deemed too cognitively impaired to be charged