Former President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit Monday seeking to halt the transfer of documents from his final days in office to the House select committee investigating the breach of the U.S. Capitol building in January.
Current President Joe Biden formally rejected Trump’s claims of executive privilege last week, setting into motion the planned transfer from the National Archives to the January 6 commission of documents and communications from Trump, when he was still president, that are related to the attack.
“The President maintains his conclusion that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States,” a letter from White House counsel Dana Remus to Archivist of the United States David Ferriero stated. Remus added that “absent any intervening court order,” the White House expected the documents and communication logs from the former president to be given to the commission within 30 days.
However, Trump filed a lawsuit on Monday seeking to have the courts prevent the January 6 commission from seeing his White House documents related to the breach of the Capitol that happened after an incendiary speech he gave to a mob of his loyalists. He listed the commission and the National Archives as defendants in his brief.
“The Committee’s request amounts to nothing less than a vexatious, illegal fishing expedition openly endorsed by Biden and designed to unconstitutionally investigate President Trump and his administration,” Trump claims in the filing. “Our laws do not permit such an impulsive, egregious action against a former president and his close advisors.”
The commission is trying to “harass President Trump and senior members of his administration (among others) by sending an illegal, unfounded, and overbroad records request to the Archivist,” according to the filing.
Trump’s office also put out a statement claiming that the commission’s attempt to obtain his records is illegal, arguing that it doesn’t serve a legislative process, like writing a bill or developing future policies. But legal scholars dismissed Trump’s lawsuit as baseless, noting that it had many flawed arguments.
“Trump’s suit is riddled with groundless assertions, starts and ends by treating Trump as though he were still POTUS, belittles Congress’s obvious need to enact laws strong enough to prevent a coup and an insurrection, and invokes inapplicable privileges,” Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe wrote on Twitter.
Members of the January 6 commission also noted that Trump’s lawsuit lacks reasonable arguments and may just be a delay tactic, with the former president hopeful that he can prevent documents reaching the select committee before the midterm elections next year.
“Precedent and law are on our side,” a statement from the commission’s co-chairs, Representatives Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), said. “We’ll fight the former president’s attempt to obstruct our investigation while we continue to push ahead successfully with our probe on a number of other fronts.”
Trump’s lawsuit is “nothing more than an attempt to delay and obstruct our probe,” the co-chairs added.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California), another member of the commission, appeared on CBS’s “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” Monday night, echoing Thompson’s and Cheney’s position.
Trump is using the courts “to delay, try to prevent the country from learning about his corruption,” Schiff said. “Donald Trump will lose this litigation, and he knows he’ll lose the litigation. The point isn’t winning, the point is delaying.”
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.