Donald Trump’s desperate effort to withhold documents from Congress related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot had its day in federal court Thursday. If sanity prevails, Trump’s outlandish argument — that being a former president affords him perpetual executive privilege to keep those documents hidden — will be quickly rejected.
The assault on America’s seat of government 10 months ago remains a crucial issue today, because the anti-democracy movement that drove it is still out there, looking for another opening. Trump is both the leader of that movement and the current front-runner for the GOP’s 2024 presidential nomination. That alone makes it crucial for the nation to know the full extent of his involvement in the attack, as well as the involvement of those around him.
Toward that goal, the House committee investigating the insurrection is seeking official documents from the National Archives related to Trump’s activities before and during the assault. Trump is balking at all of it — even such basic documents as the White House visitor logs and presidential daily schedules — claiming executive privilege.
Two problems: Executive privilege is traditionally something only a sitting president can assert (and even then, it is often controversial); and the privilege is meant to apply to documents related to official presidential business. In this case, the committee is seeking documents related not to Trump’s duties as president, but his role as a defeated candidate attempting to prevent the official certification of his opponent’s victory.
Though it has been loosely interpreted in the past by presidents for self-serving reasons, the concept of executive privilege is, in theory, supposed to serve the public by affirming the separation of powers. How is the public possibly served by withholding from a congressional investigation any information about a former president’s activities related to an uprising that cost lives and threatened many others, including a sitting vice president?
The Biden White House has declined Trump’s request to assert executive privilege over the documents, and legal scholars say Trump’s chances of winning that protection in court are thin. Among the issues that could (and should) sway the federal court in Washington to open the records is the fact that it was Trump’s campaign apparatus, not his presidential administration, that was primarily driving the activities the committee is looking into. As The Washington Post reported this week, those activities included major campaign expenditures — personally approved by Trump himself — to maintain a “command center” at a hotel near the White House where the effort to overturn the election results was coordinated.
Republicans who wear partisan blinders will continue to scoff at the notion that the most serious domestic attack on the U.S. government since the Civil War — and the only one that involved a sitting president — must be investigated until all questions are answered. To everyone else, this should be obvious. Hopefully, the court will agree.
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