Committees request transcript from Biden’s classified docs interview, classified Ukraine memos

The three House committees leading the impeachment inquiry into President Biden sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday requesting the classified Ukraine-related documents that special counsel Robert Hur found in Biden’s possession.

The committees also requested the transcript from the president’s interview with the special counsel.

These requests come after Hur released his long-awaited report on President Biden’s handling of classified documents. In his report, Hur concluded that Biden “willfully” kept classified documents and shared them with the ghostwriter of his memoir, yet recommended no charges, in part because of concerns about the president’s memory.

“As explained to Mr. Hur in October, there is concern that President Biden may have retained sensitive documents related to specific countries involving his family’s foreign business dealings,” Chairmen James Comer of the Oversight Committee, Jim Jordan of the Judiciary Committee, and Jason Smith of the Ways and Means Committee wrote in the letter.

“Further, we seek to understand whether the White House or President Biden’s personal attorneys placed any limitations or scoping restrictions during the interview that would have precluded a line of inquiry regarding evidence (emails, text messages, or witness statements) directly linking the President to troublesome foreign payments,” they added.

You can read the letter below:

According to Hur’s report, the president retained talking points and a telephone call transcript with the Ukrainian prime minister from a key period in Hunter Biden’s Burisma Holdings employment. In a folder entitled “VP Personal” DOJ investigators found two documents relating to a December 11, 2015 call between then-Vice President Biden and then-Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk just days after Biden visited Kyiv and called for the prosecutor investigating Burisma to be fired.

The chairmen are also requesting access to President Biden’s interview transcript after he delivered a press conference on Thursday where he claimed that he did not share classified information with his ghostwriter, contradicting the conclusions contained in Hur’s report.

“In response to a question regarding sharing classified information with his ghostwriter, Mark Zwonitzer—a fact documented in Mr. Hur’s report—the President claimed, ‘I did not share classified information, I did not share it.’ This assertion appears to be false,” the Chairmen wrote. “Thus, mere hours after the release of Mr. Hur’s report, the President appears to have inaccurately contradicted key facts about its contents.”

“Throughout Mr. Hur’s report, there is reference to a transcript of an interview conducted with President Biden on October 8 and October 9, 2023,” the Chairmen added. “The Committees require this transcript and any other records of this interview, including, but not limited to, any recordings, notes, or summaries of the interview.”

The transcript could also shed light on the prosecutor’s scathing assessment of President Biden’s mental acuity.  In his report of Biden’s interview with his team, Hur recounted that the president could not remember the years he served as Barack Obama’s vice president nor the year that his eldest son, Beau Biden, died of brain cancer.