(RepublicanNews.org) – Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey has thrown his weight behind the campaign to release the audio recording of Pres. Biden’s interview with special counsel Robert Hur.
Mukasey held the position of U.S. Attorney General between 2007 and 2009, while Pres. George W. Bush was in the White House. Government lawyers are using a letter Mukasey wrote during this time to justify the White House’s decision not to release the Hur interview.
Mukasey claims that these lawyers have misrepresented his 2008 letter. He has now filed a declaration in a Washington D.C. court in which he makes his opposition clear, officially bringing him on board with the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project lawsuit. Mukasey’s letter was penned during a probe into the public reveal of a CIA spy, Valerie Plame. In it, he wrote that releasing audio tapes could put future witnesses off coming forward.
Government lawyers have since used that argument to justify Pres. Biden using his executive privilege to suppress the recording of his interview with Hur. During the interview, Hur questioned Biden on alleged mishandling of classified documents. Later, Hur wrote that it would not be worth prosecuting Biden due to his age and apparent memory issues.
Mukasey, however, says that his 2008 argument referred to matters of official White House business, and not “private conduct.” He claims that Biden’s interview falls into the latter category, and has criticized the current Attorney General, Merrick Garland, for refusing to cooperate with subpoenas demanding the release of the recordings. Mukasey has called Garland’s reasoning for withholding the recordings “flawed” and “unconvincing” and claimed in his filing that Biden’s use of executive privilege in this case is a mistake.
Mukasey wrote that by withholding the tapes, the Biden administration is potentially damaging future presidents’ ability to invoke executive privilege when necessary. He also said that releasing the audio recording of the interview would help people to better assess the president’s “mental acuity” and the other factors that led Hur to decide against prosecution.
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