Attorney General Merrick Garland will take the hot seat during a House Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday where he’s expected to face a grilling over the Trump conviction and refusing to release audio from President Biden’s special counsel interview.
It’s the top Justice Department official’s first time facing lawmakers since a jury found Donald Trump guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records over hush money payments to Stormy Daniels on Thursday.
And it comes just as Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan proposed ‘defunding’ all of the prosecutions against Donald Trump in what would be an unprecedented move.
Jordan submitted a legislative proposal to the Appropriations Committee that would ban any funds from being used to prosecute a former or current vice president or president.
That would claw back the funding of prosecutions led by Georgia district attorney Fani Willis, New York district attorney Alvin Bragg, special counsel Jack Smith and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., isn’t stopping there. She is planning to lead an effort to ‘defund New York’ by blocking the state from receiving any federal funds at all.
Two House panels have already voted to advance a resolution to hold Garland in contempt for failing to release audio of Biden’s interview with Robert Hur over his handling of classified documents. The DOJ has released a transcript, but not the recording.
Garland lashed out at the move, saying earlier Thursday that the DOJ has gone to ‘extraordinary lengths’ to provide the committee with information.
‘We have gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that a committees get responses to their legitimate requests, but this is not one,’ Garland told reporters ahead of a hearing to advance his contempt charge.
A jury of seven men and five women made their decision as the former President faced 34 counts of falsifying business records on Thursday. His sentencing date is set for July 11.
It comes after five weeks of dramatic evidence and 22 witnesses being quizzed on the stand.
The case is the first time a former U.S. President has faced a criminal trial.
The Trump team has vowed to appeal the conviction. He will now face the Appellate Division in Manhattan, and possibly the Court of Appeals, and will remain free on bail while he appeals.
The charges Trump faced each carried a maximum potential sentence of up to four years in prison.
In a court filing on Friday the DOJ warned that releasing audio could lead to AI manipulation of the president’s words.
‘The passage of time and advancements in audio, artificial intelligence, and ‘deep fake’ technologies only amplify concerns about malicious manipulation of audio files. If the audio recording is released here, it is easy to foresee that it could be improperly altered, and that the altered file could be passed off as an authentic recording and widely distributed,’ the department wrote in a 49-page filing.
The attorney general had until April 8 to hand over requested materials from Robert Hur’s interviews with Biden that led him to conclude the president is ‘elderly’ and ‘well-meaning’ but has a ‘poor memory.’
They subpoenaed transcripts, notes, audio and video files largely related to Hur’s interview.
While the DOJ has handed over transcripts of Hur’s interviews with Biden as well as the transcripts of an interview with Biden’s ghostwriter Mark Zwonitzer, Republicans are unsatisfied.
They have insisted they need audio from the Hur and Zwonitzer interviews too.
The DOJ said releasing audio as well might make it harder for prosecutors to secure recorded interviews in the future, with witnesses knowing they could be blasted out into the public.
Falsifying business records would typically be a lower-level misdemeanor, but his charges have been raised to felony level because of a second crime: attempting to influence the 2016 election.
The judge could consider the unprecedented nature of the case and choose not to put a former president and current candidate behind bars.