Biden orders release of Trump White House visitor logs to January 6 panel
Joe Biden has delivered another blow to Donald Trump’s efforts to keep secret his actions around the time of the deadly January 6 Capitol insurrection by refusing to exert executive privilege over the former president’s White House visitor logs, according to a report published on Wednesday.
The president has directed the National Archives to turn over the records within 15 days to the House committee investigating the attack by Trump supporters as a “in the light of the urgency” of the panel’s work, the New York Times says.
Trump had insisted that details of who visited him in the White House were protected by executive privilege, a claim identical to the one Biden rejected last year over hundreds of pages of documents, including call logs, daily presidential diaries, handwritten notes and memos from aides. Trump took that case to appeal but lost in the supreme court last month.
The investigation by the House select committee has become increasingly focused on Trump’s Oval Office in recent weeks as it also attempts to unravel his efforts to overturn his defeat by Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
Knowledge of who visited the White House and when is seen as crucial to the panel’s inquiry, following recent revelations that a “war room” of Trump insiders, including his personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, was set up to plot ways to try to prevent Biden from taking office.
Trump, meanwhile, continues to expound the big lie that his election defeat was fraudulent as he mulls his decision to run again in 2024.
Biden’s decision to reject the privilege claim came on Monday in a letter to the National Archives by the White House counsel, Dana Remus, the NYT reported.
The letter stated that Biden had considered Trump’s claim that because he was president at the time of the attack on the US Capitol the records should remain private, but determined that it was “not in the best interest of the United States” to do so, the Associated Press reported.
Echoing arguments given in Biden’s previous rejection of executive privilege claims, Remus said that “Congress has a compelling need” to see the documents judiciously, and that “constitutional protections of executive privilege should not be used to shield, from Congress or the public, information that reflects a clear and apparent effort to subvert the Constitution itself”, the Times account states.
The newspaper said it had obtained a copy of the letter sent on Tuesday to David Ferriero, the official archivist of the US, and that the White House planned to notify Trump’s lawyers on Wednesday. It was not immediately clear if Trump will appeal the decision legally given his earlier supreme court defeat.
The bipartisan House panel has interviewed dozens of witnesses and reviewed thousands of documents as it tries to untangle the events following Trump’s defeat, with the waters beginning to lap at the doors of the former president’s Oval Office.
Members on both sides insisted at the weekend that they expected Giuliani, who has so far resisted efforts to appear, to give what could be crucial testimony. The former New York mayor and Trump adviser has been implicated in an alleged plot to seize voting machines in several contested states.
Other key Trumpworld insiders have refused to cooperate with the committee, including the former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. The House of Representatives recommended criminal contempt charges for Meadows in December, and Bannon pleaded not guilty to a contempt of Congress charge in November.
Others from the Trump administration have been more talkative, with aides close to Mike Pence, the former vice-president, providing evidence. Pence has become embroiled in a public dispute with his former boss, openly rebutting Trump’s false claims that he had the power to refuse to certify Biden’s victory.
According to Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the January 6 panel, public hearings could begin in the spring or summer, as the clock ticks towards November’s midterm elections and a likely shutting down of the inquiry by any new Republican House majority.
Pressure is mounting on Trump, who is facing at least 19 separate legal challenges, according to a Guardian tally this month. The Washington Post reported last week that Trump took boxes of records, including top secret documents, to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida retreat, when he left office, in possible violation of government record-keeping laws.
And an upcoming book from New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman claims that Trump periodically clogged White House toilets by attempting to flush away printed papers. Trump has denied the allegations.