Justice Dept. Says It Won’t Prosecute Garland for Contempt

The Justice Department said on Friday that it would not prosecute Attorney General Merrick B. Garland for declining to comply with a congressional subpoena for audio recordings of President Biden’s interview by a special counsel.

The decision had been expected. The Justice Department does not consider it a crime for a government official to fail to comply with a subpoena for material when the president has invoked executive privilege, as Mr. Biden did last month. The privilege is a constitutional prerogative to lawfully keep secret certain internal information concerning the executive branch.

“The longstanding position of the department is that we will not prosecute an official for contempt of Congress for declining to provide subpoenaed information subject to a presidential assertion of executive privilege,” Carlos Felipe Uriarte, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, wrote in a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson.

A spokesman for Mr. Johnson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

House Republicans voted on Wednesday to declare Mr. Garland in contempt of Congress and to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department. It escalated a dispute over the disclosure of recordings of an interview that Robert K. Hur, the special counsel who investigated the president’s handling of classified documents, had conducted with Mr. Biden.

Mr. Garland named Mr. Hur, a former Trump-appointed U.S. attorney, as a special counsel in January 2023 to investigate how classified documents from Mr. Biden’s vice presidency had ended up at his house in Delaware and in an office in Washington that he used after leaving office.