President Joe Biden rejected former President Donald Trump’s executive privilege claims over White House docs and ordered that White House visitor logs be released to the House panel investigating the violent Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection on the Capitol.
In a letter to the National Archives, Biden’s White House granted the House select committee access to the data because of the urgency of their work. He gave the National Archives a 15-day deadline to turn over the logs to the committee.
Biden’s counsel, Dana Remus, wrote in the letter that Biden has determined that Trump’s assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States, and therefore makes it unjustified.
According to legal experts, Trump has been erroneously claiming executive privilege over documents related to the Jan. 6 riot, extending his reach well beyond what executive privilege is supposed to cover. He has also recently been accused of destroying official records that were supposed to go to the National Archives, and possibly even clogged White House toilets in attempts to flush the records.
Last year, Biden rejected Trump’s bid to completely block the Jan. 6 House committee from accessing batches of documents from his time as president. Trump filed a lawsuit to withhold the records, which federal courts ultimately rejected.
Legal experts said that constitutional protections of executive privilege are not meant to be used to shield information that pertains to efforts to subvert the Constitution.
Former President Barack Obama made White House visitor logs open to the public for transparency. Trump reversed this, saying that it was a “national security risk.” Now people are asking, what is he hiding?
It is not yet known if Trump will attempt again to block the release of the visitor logs that Biden has now ordered the release of. What is also unclear is what the logs may show.
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