The chair of the panel investigating the 6 January attack on the US Capitol says that his committee has received the White House visitor logs it has been seeking for several months – and that they are already yielding important insights.
According to CNN, Representative Bennie Thompson has described the documents as “very fruitful”. The select committee’s hope was that by identifying those who had access to the president on the day of the riot, they might be able to piece together more of his decision-making process during a window of several hours where his precise movements and actions are still not fully established.
The visitor logs are part of a larger tranche of administration documents that Mr Trump has struggled to keep out of the committee’s hands, claiming that they fall under the protection of “executive privilege”.
With Joe Biden refusing to agree with that claim, the defence has not held up in court, and after a long phase of legal wrangling, the National Archives has been transferring assorted records and communications to the committee in recent weeks.
The committee’s work is pursuing many lines of inquiry, but the president’s personal conduct before and during the riot is increasingly central to its work. That was made clear last week via a court filing in which the panel explicitly accused Mr Trump and his onetime legal adviser John Eastman of engaging in a “criminal conspiracy” to overturn the election results in Congress.
That conclusion was drawn from Mr Eastman’s communications around the time of the insurrection, some of which the committee was again able to obtain despite the lawyer’s claims of attorney-client privilege.
Another critical window into the president’s movements during the riot came with text messages received by then-chief of staff Mark Meadows, some of which the committee released publicly when Mr Meadows refused to testify.
They included messages from congressional Republicans, Fox News hosts and even some of Mr Trump’s children, all of them imploring Mr Meadows to ask Mr Trump to call off his supporters as they stormed the Capitol – an indication that the then-president was not in contact with even many of his closest aides and allies during the riot.
One key figure in the effort to explain his decisions that day is Ivanka Trump, who is thought to have had personal access to him during the crucial hours in question. She is reportedly in talks to co-operate with the panel’s inquiry.
