Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee last Thursday advanced a resolution to recommend contempt of Congress charges against the ghostwriter of Joe Biden’s memoir for refusing to comply with a subpoena in connection to a probe into the special counsel investigation of the president’s mishandling of classified documents.
Committee members voted along partisan lines for the full House to vote on recommending that the Justice Department charge writer Mark Zwonitzer with criminal contempt.
Zwonitzer was the author of Biden’s 2007 memoir “Promises to Keep” and 2017 memoir “Promise Me, Dad.” In his interviews with Biden for the 2017 memoir, Zwonitzer was exposed to classified material that was kept in the former vice president’s Washington townhome.
The resolution states that Zwonitzer has continued to withhold the subpoenaed documents and materials that were “crucial” for the committee’s understanding of the extent of Biden’s mishandling of classified documents as well as the ghostwriter’s “storage and deletion” of the materials on his computer.
The special counsel’s report noted that after the investigation began, Zwonitzer deleted the files from his computer. However, the special counsel’s office declined to prosecute him for obstruction.
In a letter to Chairman Jim Jordan before the committee vote, White House counsel Ed Siskel said Republicans on the committee refused to engage with White House officials to accommodate their subpoena before they publicly targeted Zwonitzer.
Siskel accused Republicans of engaging in the same “weaponization of government” that they purportedly decried. He said that Republicans were “out of bounds” when they placed a private citizen in their “political crosshairs” rather than “engage with the Executive Branch.”
Republican lawmakers launched a probe of special counsel Robert Hur’s investigation after Hur issued his final report in February, which found that Biden illegally retained and shared classified materials but a conviction would be unlikely as jurors would conclude that the president was an “elderly man with a poor memory.”
The Republican-controlled House previously voted to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to provide the audio recording of President Biden’s October 2023 interviews with Special Counsel Robert Hur.
