Disgraced Florida retiree Donald Trump is resorting to lies and begging in a scheme to delay the January 6th investigation in court as made plain by a filing written by his legal team.
The House 1/6 Committee has requested a wide range of Trump administration documents related to the Capitol insurrection in which Trump supporters violently stormed the building to overthrow democracy.
President Joe Biden has repeatedly rejected Trump’s assertion of executive privilege, which means the documents can be released to the committee. Former presidents do not enjoy executive privilege, but Trump is trying to create a shadow presidency.
To that end, he is begging the federal courts to help him assert executive privilege and block or delay the committee’s investigation.
“This Court should refuse to allow Defendants’ naked political ploy and preserve the institution of the presidency,” Trump lawyer Jesse Binnall wrote in the filing, going on to lie that “both the FBI and Senate have confirmed that there was no coordinated effort, including at the White House, to overturn the election on January 6.”
In fact, the Senate never made such a determination and neither did the FBI. However, the organizers of the January 6th event that turned into a domestic terrorist attack have confirmed that several Republican members of Congress helped plan the effort to overturn the legitimate election results. Furthermore, if Trump and his team did not coordinate the insurrection, he should have no problem releasing the documents the committee has requested as surely they will exonerate him, right?
Well, Trump is also asking the judge to examine every page of the documents, which would take several months to complete.
“Members of the Committee have already concluded that the former President is responsible, no matter what the evidence says,” Binnall wrote. “They can legislate accordingly, or they must explain why each item requested would be material to any decision they intend to make.”
No, the committee does not have to explain anything. That’s not the way this works. The committee made a request and Biden has granted it. Trump has no power to stop it. He can cry about it, but his executive privilege ended the day he left office.
And of course, the filing wouldn’t be complete without an attack on the Justice Department, which Trump himself tried to politicize and use as a weapon against his political opponents and critics, including asking the DOJ to overturn the election.
“It is curious that Department of Justice has submitted a brief in this case on behalf of the Archivist and NARA when those parties ostensibly have no interest in whether the records at issue here are disclosed or not,” Binnall wrote. “One can only assume that President Biden has endorsed the naked politicization of the Justice Department in the service of his own political ends.”
Actually, since Trump’s lawsuit names the National Archives and the Archivist of the United States— a federal agency and employee— as defendants, the Justice Department automatically represents them. Biden had nothing to do with it. Trump brought this all on himself.
In the end, every court in this country has a duty to reject Trump’s desperate executive privilege claim. He is a former president, therefore, he cannot override the waiving of executive privilege protections by the sitting president. This filing should be laughed out of court.
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