Trump Attorneys Seek To Block Release Of Jan. 6 Documents

A national justice expressed skepticism Thursday erstwhile attorneys for erstwhile President Donald Trump asked her to forestall the handover of documents sought by a House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Some of the committee's requests dating backmost to April 2020 “are alarmingly broad,” U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan said. But she disagreed with claims by Trump's lawyers that Congress did not person a legislative intent for getting Trump's telephone logs, talking points and different notes from Jan. 6 arsenic his supporters stormed the Capitol successful hopes of overturning his nonaccomplishment to President Joe Biden.

Chutkan said she volition regularisation soon connected Trump's suit seeking to artifact the merchandise of documents related to the insurrection to the House committee. President Biden mostly waived enforcement privilege connected documents held by the White House, mounting up a showdown betwixt Trump and the enforcement and legislative branches that's apt to spell to the Supreme Court.

The records that would beryllium fixed to the committee see telephone logs, drafts of remarks and speeches and handwritten notes from Trump's then-chief of staff, Mark Meadows, according to a tribunal filing by the National Archives. There are besides copies of talking points from then-press caput Kayleigh McEnany and “a draught Executive Order connected the taxable of predetermination integrity," the National Archives said.

Trump called the papers requests a “vexatious, amerciable sportfishing expedition” that was “untethered from immoderate morganatic legislative purpose,” successful his suit to artifact the National Archives from turning implicit the documents.

The suit besides challenges the legality of the Presidential Records Act, which allows an incumbent president to waive enforcement privilege of a predecessor, calling it inherently unconstitutional. President Biden has said helium would spell done each petition separately to find whether that privilege should beryllium waived.

Additional reporting by The Associated Press.