'Coverup!': Joe Biden slammed as White House rejects releasing his special counsel audio interview

WASHINGTON, DC: President Joe Biden has rejected the request from Republicans in Congress to release the audio recording of his interview with a special counsel about his handling of classified documents.

On Thursday, May 16, the White House blocked the release of the recordings arguing that Republicans in Congress only wanted the audio of the interview "to chop them up."

White House claims Republicans requested Joe Biden's recordings for 'partisan political purposes'

The standoff over the recordings is at the center of a Republican push to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The move appears to be a strategy to undermine Biden's re-election campaign.

In a letter to House Republicans, White House counsel Ed Siskel wrote, “The absence of a legitimate need for the audio recordings lays bare your likely goal — to chop them up, distort them, and use them for partisan political purposes,”

The letter was sent ahead of the scheduled votes by two House committees on whether to refer Garland to the Justice Department for the contempt charges, due to their refusal to release the recordings.

“Demanding such sensitive and constitutionally-protected law enforcement materials from the Executive Branch because you want to manipulate them for potential political gain is inappropriate,” Siskel wrote, according to AP.

Speaker Mike Johnson slams Joe Biden for blocking release of special counsel interview audio

The controversy surrounding the release of the interview audio follows remarks made by Special Counsel Robert Hur about the President's age and mental acuity which is crucial in a challenging election year.

Slamming Biden and the White House over their refusal to release the recordings, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed the President is suppressing the tapes out of fear of public scrutiny during an election year.

In a press conference on the House steps, Johnson said, “The American people will not be able to hear why prosecutors felt the President of the United States was, in Special Counsel Robert Hur’s own words, an ‘elderly man with a poor memory,’ and thus shouldn’t be charged."

Joe Biden criticized for not releasing special counsel's audio interview

Reacting to Biden's refusal to release audio of the special counsel interview, one user on X (formerly Twitter) wrote, "Coverup! What is he afraid of? The truth?"

One user wrote, "Isn't this called conflict of interest?" while another user tweeted, "What is there to hide?"

"Guess Transparency doesn’t apply here!" a netizen commented and another user tweeted, "This isn’t suspicious at all or leading me to believe laws were broken."

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