Disgraced Florida retiree Donald Trump desperately filed a lawsuit seeking to block the House 1/6 Committee from obtaining records from his time in the White House, and legal experts immediately shot it down.
Trump insists that he can assert executive privilege even though he is no longer president. The reality is that only the sitting president can invoke executive privilege since former presidents lose all of their power and privileges once they leave office. President Joe Biden refused to assert executive privilege to protect Trump, so now Trump is crying to the courts.
The lawsuit asks the courts to side with Trump on his executive privilege claim or at least let him look through all of his records first before the National Archive releases them, undoubtedly so he can destroy or steal the records he doesn’t want the committee or the public to see because they would incriminate him.
It did not take long for legal experts to shred his lawsuit.
Executive Privilege is usually understood to protect a sitting president, not a former president. Trump’s lawsuit asks the court to do something no court has done before.
This is a very aggressive and unprecedented lawsuit that may cause delay, but is unlikely to succeed. https://t.co/i3m5SbMKWV
— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) October 18, 2021
Trump’s suit is riddled with groundless assertions, starts and ends by treating Trump as though he were still POTUS, belittles Congress’s obvious need to enact laws strong enough to prevent a coup and an insurrection, and invokes inapplicable privileges https://t.co/aZecTGYzKt
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) October 19, 2021
Multiple choice test:
1. Trump is trying to stop document disclosure because he cares about protecting future presidential deliberations.
2. Trump is trying to stop disclosure because he’s afraid of what will be revealed about his guilt.
Spoiler alert: No credit for Yes on #1. https://t.co/NCQfXc4CRr— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) October 19, 2021
I cannot stop laughing at the pathetic premise of Trump’s lawsuit that the Presidential Records Act must be unconstitutional if it permits the incumbent president to overrule a former president on privilege issues.
What a flaccid little cry baby.
— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) October 18, 2021
This guy has spent his entire career bluffing his way through life, evading responsibility, dodging accountability, and filing frivolous lawsuits to distract and delay.
Justice means nothing in America if Trump is not held accountable for his crimes. https://t.co/TAlW3rzMvF
— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) October 18, 2021
Trump’s team is seeking either a judicial declaration that the 1/6 committee lacks a legislative purpose (which hasn’t worked in the past) or a compromise order postponing disclosure of the materials until Trump has done a privilege review. It’s not very strong imo. pic.twitter.com/tX1GMJrudF
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) October 18, 2021
If Trump did nothing wrong, he would not be desperately trying to keep his White House records secret. This lawsuit is not the act of an innocent man. It’s an act by a man who is guilty of orchestrating and inciting the attempted overthrow of our democracy. And judges not only need to laugh him out of their courtrooms, but he also needs to be prosecuted.
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