Trump plans to sue to keep White House records on Capitol attack secret | Donald Trump | The Guardian
By: the Guardian
I'm sure the former POTUS has nothing to hide...
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Donald Trump is preparing to sue to block the release of White House records from his administration to the House select committee scrutinizing the 6 January attack on the Capitol by claiming executive privilege, potentially touching off an extended legal battle over disclosure.
The former president also expects top aides - former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino, strategist Steve Bannon and defense department aide Kash Patel - to defy select committee subpoenas for records and testimony.
Trump's moves to try to resist the select committee, informed by a source familiar with his planning, are likely to lead to constitutional clashes in court that would test the power of Congress's oversight authority over the executive branch.
The former president said in recent days that he would cite executive privilege to thwart House select committee investigators seeking to compel his top aides to testify about 6 January and what he knew of plans to stop the certification of Joe Biden's election win.
But the sharpening contours of Trump's intention to stonewall the select committee mark a new turning point as he seeks to keep a grip on the rapidly escalating investigation into the events of 6 January that left five dead and about 140 others injured.
The plan to prevent House select committee investigators from receiving Trump White House records revolves around exploiting the procedure by which the National Archives allows both the Biden administration and Trump to review materials for executive privilege claims.
After the National Archives identifies and transmits to Biden and Trump the records requested by the select committee, Trump has 30 days to review the materials and ask the administration to assert executive privilege over any to stop their release.
The records are being delivered to Biden and Trump hundreds or thousands of pages at a time on a rolling basis, and the first tranche of documents was sent by the National Archives on 31 August, according to a source familiar with the matter.
As president, Biden retains the final authority over whether to assert the protection for specific documents, meaning that he can instruct the White House counsel, Dana Remus, to allow their release even over Trump's objections after an additional 60 days has passed.
The former president, however, can then file lawsuits to block their release - a legal strategy that Trump and his advisers are preparing to pursue insofar as it could tie up the records in court for months and stymie evidence-gathering by the select committee.
It was not immediately clear how Trump would approach such legal challenges, and whether it would, for instance, involve individual suits against the release of specific records. A spokesperson for the former president did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump expects top aides such as his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, left, to defy congressional subpoenas for testimony and documents.
Trump is not guaranteed to win such cases over executive privilege given he is no longer president and the White House office of legal counsel previously declined to assert the protection for previous 6 January-related testimony by Trump justice department officials.
But the plan could delay, and therefore hamper, House select committee investigators as they aim to produce a final report before the 2022 midterm elections in order to shield their work from accusations of partisanship as the nation returns to the polls.
The select committee at the very latest is probably facing a hard deadline of January 2023 by which to complete its report, since Republicans will not vote to reauthorize a panel investigating Trump and his allies should they, as expected, retake control of the House.
As for the subpoenas issued to his top aides, Trump has said in recent days that he would invoke executive privilege to prevent Meadows, Scavino, Bannon and Patel from testifying to the select committee, repeating a tactic successfully used during his first impeachment.
In a freewheeling statement after the select committee announced the subpoenas - deliberations first reported by the Guardian - the former president lashed out at the select committee's inquiry as a partisan exercise and criticized their zeal to target his closest advisers.
"We will fight the subpoenas on executive privilege and other grounds for the good of our country, while we wait to find out whether or not subpoenas will be sent out to Antifa and BLM for the death and destruction they have caused," Trump said.
The former president signaled his intentions to threaten a prolonged legal fight over White House records from his administration after the select committee first made its documents requests to the National Archives at the end of August.
"Executive privilege will be defended, not just on behalf of my administration and the patriots who worked beside me, but on behalf of the office of the president of the United States and the future of our nation," Trump said in a statement.
The justice department has typically fought to keep private, executive-branch discussions between presidents and top advisers secret, to avoid setting a precedent that could prevent officials from having candid conversations for fear that they might later become public.
But with the former acting attorney general Jeff Rosen and his deputy, Richard Donoghue, the White House office of legal counsel cleared them to provide "unrestricted testimony" to Congress about Trump's efforts to reinstall himself in office because of the gravity of the matter.
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might be a little difficult to explain the party atmosphere in the west wing during the insurrection...
please help keep christo-fascism and white supremacy off the NT front page by commenting and voting up seeds like this one - thank you
All the magaturds who are against this investigation including whatshisname are complicit in 1/6/21.
NO DOUBT ABOUT THAT WHATSOEVER
Damn skippy!
lol, I haven't heard that terms in awhile..
You know that's true though, right?
I know. I haven't used it in ages. I thought about providing a link just in case I was the only person who knew what it meant.
On a somewhat related note, there used to be a bar in Arlington called Skippy's Mistake. One Saturday afternoon, Skippy realized that he had a hit on his hands and decided that he needed extra parking. He dashed out, rented a big-ass bulldozer, and plowed down trees, shrubs, etc to make more room for parking. Later, he sold shirts that said, 'Damn, Skippy!' (emphasis on Damn instead of Skippy) That bar was the best hole-in-the-wall ever.
Of course.
Damn skippy: exclamation of excitement or approval Source
Go ahead Trump you chump stain. Your track record for lawsuits suck.
Why?
White privilege invocation if he gets it. Btw, Artful Liar Donald is demonstrating his smarts that he told us all he has! He uses the courts as his personal shield. And the (dumb) courts can't see to JUDGE when they are being (ab)used!
The good news is the courts can speed up deciding on such suits; the bad news is Artful Liar is training conservatives the proper way to drag out congressional hearing that are destined to have a solid time-lime.
White privilege. No person of color could ever pull this 'off' because some conservatives would stumble all over themselves to populate the bills (and law) to shut this tactic down!
Gotta love that transparency. It's already been proven he has tried to hide anything and everything that might make him look bad. Even golfing while his brother lay on his deathbed.
I hope the SDNY attorneys go after his kids first, so they can experience him bailing on them first hand. then it will get interesting...
I can't believe he'd (I can) that he'd throw Melania's sister wife under the bus like that.
Oh, I do, especially if his own neck is on the line
I know it's difficult, but to think like a trump you need to go for total scumbag logic and reason.
I have nothing to hide, DJT.
Cofveve
Another set back for team Trump
Lawsuit over misuse of music without permission moves forward
Judge Rejects Donald Trump Bid to Escape Song Copyright Lawsuit (msn.com)
the good sister has a seed up about that...
And there it is folks! We have a real corporate fighter in Artful Liar! He thinks he can dig his 'claws' into our foundation of jurisprudence and not be shaken off for the ride! Artful Liar is at his best in a court of law. This reminds me of someone I used to know, who could and surely would have his lawyers file a suit, physically go to jail (if need be), and make money in his businesses during delays and up to and touching the cease and desist orders.
Artful Liar is a real threat. You can not toy around with a man who is willing to shell out for high-price lawyers. To bring down this type of man you have to be one step ahead of him at every stage.
Get seriously offensive or be wildly out-matched and a laughingstock. Or, win a few cases. . . . and bankrupt his ass for having the audacity to strive into the 'contest'!
Artful Liar is a chump, but he can and will eat other chumps by the bunch if they don't come at him right!
Or, deploy legal jujitsu techniques and develop ways to have Artful Liars 'heavyweight' lawyers act against him!
trumpturd doesn't have executive privilege since he's an ex-'president' plus he's not above the law as he seems to think and he's the one who incited his insurrectionist domestic terrorist mob in the first place.
The tactic is to delay. Set the 'heat' coming his way in a cool-down zone for the duration. In the meantime, work to take over congress and the senate and end the subpoenas and "demands" for answers. Then, let it peter out.
He tells the world every day that he really won the election, so in his swiss cheese mind, he is still president.
He knows he is not president, because official presidents domicile in Washington, D.C. in the White House. Artful Liar Donald believes in living in the world he makes for himself, that is, as long as he can not be compelled to accept a shared reality, he won't. He chooses to live in what KellyAnn Conway calls "alternative reality" - where Putin is America's friend and Kim Jung Un dates other world leaders.
the former, single term, twice impeached, never won the popular vote, never conceded defeat in a free and fair election, attempted to obstruct the peaceful transition of power, and has continued to lie about the results and his loss, POTUS. loser.
When laid out like this it is easy to see Artful Liar Donald Trump has been terrorizing us and this nation.