WASHINGTON (Washington Insider Magazine) – Former President Donald Trump’s plea for a block of a lower court order that hundreds of papers of his presidential documents from Jan. 6 be turned over to a house committee probing the attack on the US Capitol was denied on Wednesday by the Supreme Court.
The result was 8-1 in favor. The application would have been granted if Justice Clarence Thomas had been present.
After Trump decided to sue the panel as well as the National Archives, affirming executive privilege, more than 750 pages long records that the National Archivist had ascertained were significant to the January 6 investigation into Trump’s attempts to invalidate the 2020 election and the later attack on the Capitol, an appeals court put a temporary halt on the official records handover in November, according to ABC News.
White House memoranda, call and visitor records from Jan. 6 and later were among the information required by the committee.
The leaders of the Senate committee applauded the Supreme Court’s decision.
Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and co-chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., stated in a joint statement that the Supreme Court’s decision was a triumph for the rule of law and American democracy.
Trump’s lawyer, Jesse Binnall, claimed in the lawsuit that the panel has vowed to torment President Trump by sending an unauthorized, baseless, and overbroad records application to the US Archivist, and that President Joe Biden has engaged in a political ploy to appease his partisan supporters by refusing to restrict the discharge of Trump’s records to the committee on Jan. 6.
Instead, Biden directed the National Archives to produce data that Trump claimed were confidential discussions.
The committee’s efforts to collect papers that could throw more light on what Trump had been doing — as well as how the White House responded — while hundreds of thousands of Trump followers invaded the Capitol building were rewarded with a major court success. It’s also a major setback for Trump, who has spent the last few months seeking to diminish the gravity of the Capitol attack while preventing the release of records he claims show no proof of misconduct by himself or anyone he was interacting with at the time of the incident.
