DENIED! Biden Won’t Honor Trump’s Executive Privilege Claim on White House Visitor Logs

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Former President Donald Trump’s effort to keep White House visitor logs away from the House Select Committee investigation on January 6th was denied by the Biden administration.  Trump’s claim of “Executive Privilege” was opposed by President Joe Biden, who has since directed the National Archives to hand over the visitor logs the committee is seeking.

Writing for the New York Times, Michael Schmidt reports:

In a letter to the National Archives, Mr. Biden’s White House counsel, Dana Remus, said Mr. Biden had rejected Mr. Trump’s claims that the visitor logs were subject to executive privilege and that “in light of the urgency” of the committee’s work, the agency should provide the material to the committee within 15 days.

Mr. Biden had similarly decided last year not to support Mr. Trump’s claim of executive privilege over other batches of White House documents and records sought by the committee. Mr. Trump went to federal court to block the release of those earlier batches but lost.

Citing in part the same reasoning as in the earlier case, Ms. Remus told the National Archives that the documents needed to be disclosed in a timely fashion because “Congress has a compelling need.” She said that “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.”

Trump and a number of his political allies, like Steve Bannon for example, have tried to claim privilege to stunt the investigation by the Congressional committee looking into the attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters, as well as the events that lead up to that violent riot.

Read the full NY Times report here.