Previous U.S. President Donald Trump on Wednesday failed another bid to halt congressional analysts from escorting White House records he wants to keep hidden.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan refused to put on hold her decision from Tuesday allowing a House of Representatives committee to get Trump White House records narrating to the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“This court will not completely disregard its own reasoning,” she wrote.
Trump’s lawyers had asked Chutkan to pause the execution of her ruling while he appealed it to a higher court.
The National Archives, a central agency that holds Trump’s White House records, is scheduled to give Congress hundreds of pages of records on Friday, excluding a possible order from the USA Court Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The case apparently will finally head to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Chutkan’s decision let the House committee examine the attack to obtain telephone records, visitor logs and other White House documents that Trump wants to be blocked.
The Republican previous president had claimed that the materials demanded by the committee were covered by a legal theory known as an executive privilege that protects the confidentiality of some White House conversations.
But Chutkan, in her Tuesday ruling, refused that argument in a clear conquest for congressional oversight powers.
“At the bottom, this is a conflict between a previous and incumbent President,” Chutkan said in her Tuesday order. “And the Court has now clear that in such circumstances, the incumbent’s view is allowed greater weight.”
Trump “does not acknowledge the respect owed” to Biden’s judgment as to the current president, Chutkan said. She remarked on examples of past presidents failing to support executive privilege and rejected what she said was Trump’s claim that administrative privilege “exists in perpetuity.”
“Presidents are not leaders, and Plaintiff is not President,” she said.
The committee has said it needs the demanded materials to understand the position Trump may have played in promoting the riot in which his followers aimed to block legislators from approving Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential win.
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