WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden has instructed the National Archives to give White House visitor logs to the House Jan. 6 Select Committee, again rejecting his predecessor’s claims of executive privilege over documents that might shed light on last year’s insurrection attempt.
In a letter to the National Archives, White House counsel Dana Remus said Biden had rejected former President Donald Trump’s claims that the visitor logs, which include who visited the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, were subject to executive privilege and that “in light of the urgency” of the committee’s work, the agency should provide the material to the committee within 15 days.
Trump sued in October to block the release of other White House documents when Biden made a similar decision not to uphold his executive privilege claims. The Supreme Court in January ordered the documents be handed over to the committee, agreeing with two lower courts that the former president’s claim of executive privilege could not outweigh the views of the current president, who supported the release.
In the letter sent Tuesday, Remus told the National Archives that “Congress has a compelling need” to view the documents. She echoed Biden’s initial decision not to uphold Trump’s claim last year and said that “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.”
It is unclear whether Trump will attempt to block the visitor logs from being released. The White House has routinely made visitor logs public under Biden, and also did so under Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama. Trump representatives did not immediately respond to a Los Angeles Times request for comment.
Archivist David Ferriero said in a letter Wednesday notifying Trump of the decision that the records will be provided to the committee by March 3 “unless prohibited by a court order.”
“The majority of the entries over which the former President has asserted executive privilege would be publicly released under current policy. 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,” Remus said in the letter.
House Select Committee investigators have obtained thousands of pages of records and hours of testimony as they build a timeline of Trump’s actions the day thousands of Americans fought with police to breach the U.S. Capitol building over Trump’s false claims that the election had been stolen. They are also creating a timeline of actions he and political advisers took before and after the November election to challenge the official results and derail congressional certification of the results.
The committee is expected to begin public hearings this spring.
