Trump wants logs, aide’s notes kept from Jan. 6 panel

Former President Donald Trump is trying to block documents including call logs, drafts of remarks and speeches and handwritten notes from his chief of staff relating to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection from being released to the committee investigating the riot, the National Archives revealed in a court filing Saturday.

Trump has sued to prevent the National Archives from transmitting those documents, and thousands more, to the House committee investigating the attack. President Biden declined to assert executive privilege on most of Trump’s records after determining that doing so is “not in the best interests of the United States.”

The Saturday filing, which came as part of the National Archives and Record Administration’s opposition to Trump’s lawsuit, details the effort the agency has undertaken to identify records from the Trump White House in response to a broad, 13-page request from the House committee for documents pertaining to the insurrection and Trump’s efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

The document offers the first look at the sort of records that could soon be turned over to the committee for its investigation.

Billy Laster, the director of the National Archives’ White House Liaison Division, wrote that among the particular documents Trump has sought to block are 30 pages of “daily presidential diaries, schedules, appointment information showing visitors to the White House, activity logs, call logs, and switchboard shift-change checklists showing calls to the President and Vice President, all specifically for or encompassing January 6, 2021; 13 pages of “drafts of speeches, remarks, and correspondence concerning the events of January 6, 2021,” and “three handwritten notes concerning the events of January 6 from (former White House chief of staff Mark) Meadows’ files.”

Trump also tried to exert executive privilege over pages from former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany’s binders of talking points and statements “principally relating to allegations of voter fraud, election security, and other topics concerning the 2020 election.”

On Jan. 6, an armed mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in an attempt to stop the certification of Biden’s election victory. Trump was impeached by the Democratic-led House on a charge he incited the riot but was acquitted by the Republican-led Senate.

Trump called the document requests a “vexatious, illegal fishing expedition” in his lawsuit to block the National Archives from turning over the documents to the committee.