President Joe Biden has rejected Donald Trump’s claim of executive privilege over Trump-era White House visitor logs, ordering the National Archives to hand over the documents to the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, The New York Times Reports.
In a sent a letter to U.S. archivist David Ferriero dated Tuesday White House counsel Dana Remus reiterates the White House’s view on Trump’s claim, and orders the documents turned over to the committee within 15 days “unless prohibited by court order.”
“The White House believes Congress has a compelling need in service of its legislative functions” for the documents to understand circumstances leading up to “the most serious attack on the operations of the Federal Government since the Civil War,” the letter states.
Remus wrote that “The President has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States, and therefore is not justified, as to these records and portions of records.”
The letter says that the White House’s current policy is to release visitor logs for transparency, a practice that was stopped under the Trump administration. It also noted that the documents Trump is seeking to block are White House visitor logs showing appointments of those who entered the White House complex, including logs from Jan. 6, 2021, the day a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop the certification of the 2020 election.
“The majority of the entries over which the former President has asserted executive privilege would be publicly released under current policy,” Remus added.
Read the original article in The New York Times.
