President Joe Biden is rejecting executive privilege claims made by former President Donald Trump, allowing the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack to access White House visitor logs from Trump’s tenure.
The committee made the request last summer, along with a number of other requests for documents. After Biden waived executive privilege claims on hundreds of pages of documents from the Trump White House – and following several months of litigation from Trump trying to block their transfer – some of those requests have been resolved and documents have been delivered to January 6 investigators.
Visitor logs, however, including who was visiting the White House to meet with Trump in the weeks before and after the Capitol attack, have not yet been given to the January 6 committee.
In a letter to the National Archives, White House counsel Dana Remus requested that the agency deliver the visitor logs to the committee within the next 15 days, citing the “urgency” of their work. Remus also made clear that Biden would not object to the release of the logs and was waiving presidential executive privilege to make them available.
“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,” Remus wrote in the letter.
NEW: @POTUS Biden rejects Donald Trump’s claims of executive privilege over White House visitor logs and the White House counsel’s office orders @USNatArchives to release them. Full letter: pic.twitter.com/Um4izfpWHd
— Ed O'Keefe (@edokeefe) February 16, 2022
White House visitor logs had generally been made public under policies established during the Obama administration. But in April 2017, Trump announced that he would be making the logs private, ostensibly for security purposes.
Remus’s letter appeared to reject that premise, stating that the materials sought by the January 6 commission wouldn’t jeopardize the institution of the presidency.
“The majority of the entries over which the former president has asserted executive privilege would be publicly released under current policy,” Remus wrote. “As practice under that policy demonstrates, preserving the confidentiality of this type of record generally is not necessary to protect long-term institutional interests of the Executive Branch.”
It’s unclear whether Trump will seek to block the National Archives from handing over his White House visitor logs to the January 6 committee. Trump has previously tried to block access to other White House documents through months of litigation.
In mid-January, the Supreme Court announced that it would refuse to hear an appeal from Trump’s lawyers over the matter, leaving in place a lower appellate court’s ruling that said the documents could be shared with the committee.
Even if the former president is unsuccessful in blocking the White House logs from being shared, Trump may be able to use the legal process to delay their release until the January 6 committee is dissolved, if Republicans can win control of the House in this year’s midterm elections.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment. We are presently looking for 275 new monthly donors in the next 3 days.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy