The House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol has requested a massive tranche of documents from several US government agencies, CNN reported Wednesday.
The move signals the investigative panel intends to undertake a sprawling probe of security failures as Trump and his allies attempted to overturn the 2020 election results.
This initial wave of document requests was sent to various executive branch agencies, including the departments of Homeland Security, Justice, Defense and Interior, the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center and the Office of the National Intelligence as well as the National Archives, which has legal custody of all the presidential records from former President Donald Trump’s time in office.
CNN reported that the National Archives possesses documents that are relevant to the committee’s investigation and that there is a process “by which the Congress and the incumbent administration may request access to records of former administrations.”
The committee’s document requests could lead to strong pushback from Republicans and potentially lengthy fights over access.
While Trump could no longer assert executive privilege, he could still try to go to court to stop the committee from obtaining documents from the Trump White House and testimony from people like former White House Chief of Staff Meadows.
As noted by CNN, the question of executive privilege poses several potentially uncomfortable political scenarios for President Joe Biden.
The Biden administration has already declined to assert executive privilege over some testimony related to January 6, telling former Justice Department officials that they were free to provide “unrestricted testimony.”
But if Biden does assert privilege for the Trump administration, the Democrat-led committee could pursue more extreme legal avenues to try to obtain the records. If he doesn’t, that could set a precedent that opens his administration to expansive, Republican-led probes if the GOP wins either chamber in the midterm elections.
Daily Boulder reported earlier this week that congressional investigators are also poised to send notices to various telecommunications companies requesting that they preserve the phone records of several people, including members of Congress.
