Trump Visitor Logs Head to J6 Committee After Biden Declines Another Privilege Claim
With the January 6th committee working on essentially borrowed time, (given the widespread predictions of a massive “red wave” reshaping Congress after the 2022 midterms), they are going to need to pull out all the stops if they think they’re going to convince our hotly divided nation of anything at all.
Now, thanks to their allies in the White House, their work just got a whole lot easier.
President Joe Biden has rejected Donald Trump’s effort to assert executive privilege over White House visitor logs from Jan. 6, 2021, ordering the National Archives to deliver the documents to congressional investigators in two weeks.
Advertisement - story continues below“As a matter of policy, and subject to limited exceptions, the Biden Administration voluntarily discloses such visitor logs on a monthly basis. The Obama Administration followed the same practice,” White House Counsel Dana Remus said in a letter to National Archivist David Ferriero dated Feb. 15.
“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.”
Biden, who ran his 2020 campaign under the guise of “healing” the nation and moving past partisan politicking, has repeatedly refused to allow Trump any of the executive privilege that he’s claimed, despite there being precedent for former Presidents receiving such protections in the past.
Biden has already rejected a string of executive privilege claims over other Trump White House materials, like briefing memos, speech drafts and call records stretching from April 2020 to Jan. 20, 2021. Trump previously sued to prevent the Archives from disclosing the documents to Congress, but he lost a series of court battles, including before the Supreme Court, that resulted in hundreds of pages being delivered to the select committee.
The real question facing the committee will be whether or not anything they unearth or somehow conclude will move the political needle in our nation at all, or if their constant partisan posturing has galvanized the masses to the point of immobility on the matter.