DENIED: Supreme Court formally slams door on Trump’s bid for secrecy
The Supreme Court just issued a final ruling on the former president’s desperate attempt to hide behind executive privilege when the House Select Committee on January 6th comes calling for his records.
Donald J. Trump tried to prevent the House from obtaining his handwritten notes, call and visitor logs, and other key documents from falling into the hands of the committee investigating the insurrection he incited against the Capitol during the transition of power last year.
In mid-January, the Supreme Court denied Trump’s request for an emergency stay, which allowed a flood of previously withheld records in the National Archives to make their way into investigators’ hands. With today’s ruling, his losing attempt to bury the records at the D.C. Court of Appeals has all the makings of a Waterloo now that the Supreme Court formally affirmed the lower court’s decision today in a one-sentence ruling:
21-932 TRUMP, DONALD J. V. THOMPSON, BENNIE G., ET AL. The motion of States United Democracy Center, et al. for leave to file a brief as amici curiae is granted. The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied. (author’s emphasis)
Documents produced to the House January 6th Committee after last month’s initial Supreme Court ruling are those which arrived torn apart and taped back together, introducing the potential of Trump’s personal involvement in numerous plots surrounding that day based upon prior reporting that he personally attempted to destroy presidential records. That is distinct from other reporting, which said Trump tried to flush his presidential documents down a toilet.
Today’s decision from the Supreme Court could have a cascading effect since many of the disgraced ex-president’s advisors have similarly attempted to assert executive privilege to withhold records from Congress, not now they’ve got no legal foothold for those arguments.
Thus ends the legally novel question posed by Trump to the Supreme Court, if he may get a federal court to override both Congress and sitting President Joe Biden to give the former president a void of secrecy over his acts in office even after he leaves office.
He cannot.
