Trump wants call logs, aide notes hidden from the Jan. 6 panel

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Former President Donald Trump is trying to block documents including call logs, drafts of statements and speeches and handwritten notes from his chief of staff related to the Jan. 6 insurgency in the Capitol from exit to the committee investigating the riot, the National Archives revealed in a court filing early Saturday.

Mr. Trump has sued to prevent the National Archives from sending those documents, and thousands more, to the House committee investigating the attack. President Joe Biden declined to assert executive privilege on most of Mr. Trump’s records after determining that doing so was “not in the best interest of the United States.”

Saturday’s filing, which came as part of the National Archives and Records Administration’s opposition to Mr. Trump’s lawsuit, details the effort the agency has made to identify records from the Trump White House in response to a broad, 13- request page from the Chamber. committee for documents pertaining to the insurgency and Mr. Trump’s efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

The document offers a first look at the type of records that will soon be provided to the committee for its investigation.

Former President Donald Trump speaks at his Save America rally in Perry, Georgia on September 25, 2021. Ben Gray/AP

Billy Laster, director of the White House Liaison Division of the National Archives, wrote that among the specific documents Mr. Trump sought to block were 30 pages of “daily presidential diaries, schedules, information to the appointment showing White House visitors, activity logs., call logs, and switchboard shift-change checklist showing calls to the President and Vice President, all specific for or covering January 6, 2021; 13 pages of “drafts of speech, sentence, and letter regarding the events of January 6, 2021; and “three handwritten notes about events on Jan. 6 from (former White House chief of staff Mark) of the Meadows files.”

Mr. Trump also tried to exercise executive privilege on pages from former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany of controversial points and statements “primarily related to allegations of voter fraud, election security, and others. more topics about the 2020 elections. ”

Other documents include a handwritten note from Meadows files that “lists potential or scheduled briefings and phone calls about the Jan. 6 certification and other election issues. “and” a draft Executive Order on the subject of electoral integrity. ”

Laster’s declaration states that the National Archives ’search began on paper documents because it took until August for the agency to transfer digital records from the Trump White House. The National Archives, he wrote, has identified “several hundred thousand potentially responsive records” of emails from the Trump White House from the approximately 100 million sent or received during his administration, and is working to determine if they are relevant to the request of the Chamber.

So far Mr. Biden has waived executive privilege on almost all of the documents requested by the committee, even though the committee has agreed to “defer” its requests for several dozen pages of notes at the behest of the committee. Biden White House.

Explaining why Mr. Biden does not keep Mr. Trump’s records, White House adviser Dana Remus wrote that they can “shed light on events inside the White House on and about January 6 and accept the need for the Select Committee to understand the facts underlying the most serious attacks on Federal Government operations since the Civil War. ”

On Jan. 6, an armed mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in an attempt to prevent certification of Mr. Biden’s election victory. Mr. Trump was impeachable by the Democratic-led House in a case that sparked unrest but was acquitted by the Republican-led Senate.

Mr. Trump called the document requesting an “irritating, illegal fishing expedition” “not tied to any legitimate legislative intent,” in his lawsuit to block the National Archives from returning the documents to the committee.

The lawsuit also challenges the legality of the Presidential Records Act, arguing that allowing the incumbent president to waive the executive privilege of a predecessor just months after he leaves office is inherently unconstitutional. Biden said he will go through each request separately to determine if that privilege should be waived.

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