Former President Trump is trying to prevent the release of call logs, draft remarks and speeches, and handwritten notes from his chief of staff regarding the Capitol uprising on Jan. 6 to a select committee investigating the riots, the National Archives revealed in a court application. early on Saturday.
Trump sued to prevent the State Archives from the transmission of these documents and thousands of others to A commission of inquiry investigating the attack. President Biden refused to exercise executive privilege in most of Trump’s records after finding that doing so “is not in the best interests of the United States”.
Saturday’s application, received as part of the National Archives and Records Administration’s opposition to Trump’s lawsuit, details the agency’s efforts to identify records from the Trump White House in response to a broad, 13-page request from Parliament’s Committee on Documents. relating to the uprising and Trump’s efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.
The document offers a first look at a series of records that could soon be handed over to the commission for investigation.
Billy Laster, director of the National Archives White House liaison department, wrote that among the special documents Trump wanted to block were 30 pages of “daily presidential diaries, schedules, meeting information showing White House visitors, activity diaries , call logs and checklists for changing exchange plates, showing calls to the President and Vice President, all for or for January 6, 2021; 13 pages of “draft speeches, comments and correspondence relating to the events of 6 January 2021”; and »three handwritten notes relating to the events of 6 January from [former White House Chief of Staff Mark] Meadows files. “
Trump also sought to exercise privilege over pages from former White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany with speeches and statements, “primarily on allegations of voter fraud, election security, and other topics related to the 2020 election.”
Other documents sought included a handwritten note from Meadows’ files that “lists potential or scheduled meetings and phone calls regarding January 6 certification and other election issues” and “a draft executive order on the topic of election integrity.”
Laster’s statement states that the search for the National Archives began with paper documents because it took until August for digital records from Trump’s White House to be forwarded to the agency.
The National Archives, he wrote, has identified “hundreds of thousands of potentially responsive records” of emails from Trump’s White House from about 100 million sent or received during his administration and is working to determine if they relate to Parliament’s request.
He is poor so far waived the executive privilege for almost all documents requested by the committee, although the committee agreed to “defer” its demands for dozens of pages of records at the behest of Biden’s White House.
Explaining why Biden did not protect Trump’s records, White House adviser Dana Remus wrote that they could “shed light on the events in and around the White House on Jan. 6 and support the committee’s need to understand the facts underlying the most serious attack on federal action.” governments since the Civil War. “
On January 6, an armed crowd of Trump supporters broke into the Capitol building in an attempt to stop the confirmation of Biden’s electoral victory. The Democratic-led House of Representatives accused Trump of inciting unrest, but the Republican-led Senate acquitted him.
In his lawsuit to prevent the National Archives from submitting documents to the committee, Trump called the documents a “surveillance, illegal fishing expedition” that was “unrelated to any legitimate legislative purpose.”
The lawsuit also challenges the legality of the Presidential Records Act, arguing that allowing the current president to relinquish his predecessor’s executive privileges just a few months after he left office is in itself unconstitutional. Biden said he would review each request individually to see if that privilege should be waived.