Biden orders Trump admin files to be turned over to Jan. 6 Committee Donald Trump in Phoenix, Ariz. in Feb. 2020. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr) | Joe Biden in Altoona, Iowa in Aug. 2019. (Gage Skidmore/Flickr)
President Joe Biden has ordered former President Donald Trump’s White House visitor logs to be turned over to the House committee investigating the storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, again rejecting Trump’s claims of executive privilege.
According to a letter sent to the National Archives on Monday, White House counsel Dana Remus addressed the committee’s request that the National Archives release Trump administration data to Congress. Remus said Biden considered Trump’s claims of executive privilege, but determined that Trump’s assertion “is not in the best interests of the United States, and therefore is not justified, as to these records and portions of records.”
Remus’ letter stated that the “majority of the entries over which the former President has asserted executive privilege would be publicly released under current policy.” Remus also asserted that “preserving the confidentiality of this type of record generally is not necessary to protect long-term institutional interests of the Executive Branch.”
Through the letter, Biden ordered the National Archives to turn over the Trump administration documents within 15 days of notifying the former president “unless prohibited by court order.”
Remus also highlighted a previous letter she sent to the National Archives on Oct. 8, in which she asserted the so-called Jan. 6 “insurrection…must be subject to a full accounting to ensure nothing similar ever happens again.”
The White House counsel also claimed that the riot was the “most serious attack” on federal government operations “since the Civil War.”
“Congress has a compelling need in service of its legislative functions to understand the circumstances that led to . . . the most serious attack on the operations of the Federal Government since the Civil War,” she wrote. “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.”
The letter comes just days after a new court filing by Special Counsel John Durham alleged 2016 Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign team paid a technology firm to surveil internet servers belonging to then-Republican candidate Donald Trump, in what Durham described as an effort to establish a “narrative” linking Trump to Russia.
The effort to fabricate a link between Trump and the Russian bank allegedly relied on exploiting domain name system (DNS) traffic for Trump Tower, another Trump property, an unnamed healthcare provider and the Executive Office of the President of the United States (EOP).
