Legal Brief Details What Trump’s Trying to Hide From the January 6 Committee

A court filing from National Archives has revealed what documents President Donald Trump tried to block from being shared with the committee investigating the attack on the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6.

Last month, after current President Joe Biden rejected Trump’s claims of executive privilegeThe former president sued the National ArchivesThe congressional commission could be asked to limit the documents that Trump’s administration can share with them. The National Archives filed a response brief that detailed Trump’s hidden agenda.

Trump is seeking to block 750 pages of around 1,600 pages that the National Archives has deemed relevant to the commission’s work. These pages include Trump’s presidential diaries, drafts of speeches made by him and his staff, handwritten notes from aides and phone call logs — all relating to the events of January 6 and the Trump administration’s strategy to call into question the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election.

The agency said that hundreds of pages from binders kept by his former Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany — which are “made up almost entirely of talking points and statements related to the 2020 election” — were among those requested to be kept from the January 6 commission. The National Archives said that Trump tried to block other aides’ files from being shared through the lawsuit, including those from his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, his adviser Stephen Miller and his deputy counsel Patrick Philbin.

Particularly: Trump is seeking to block drafts of a speech he gave on the morning of January 6Just before a mob made up of his loyalists attacked Capitol to stop certification of the election, A draft of an executive order concerning “election integrity” is also among the documents Trump is attempting to conceal from the commission.

The National Archives filed its briefing in the hope of eventually giving the documents to the select committee. The filing by the National Archives included a section stating that Trump, the plaintiff, is unlikely to win his lawsuit.

The National Archives argued that Trump is “no longer the President, and he lacks general authority to speak for the Executive Branch or to assert its interests.” It also said that the select committee’s “purposes are legitimate and compelling,” and that the documents the committee is seeking from the agency are pertinent to its investigation of the Capitol breach that took place earlier this year.

“Plaintiff’s challenges to the legitimacy and propriety of the Committee’s request fail. The Supreme Court has long recognized that the ‘power of inquiry’ is ‘an essential and appropriate auxiliary to the legislative function,’” the agency wrote.

Reporting from The Washington Post over the weekend, based on sources with knowledge of Trump’s whereabouts during the Capitol attack, noted that the former president spent more than three hours glued to the television as the attack unfolded — and that he did nothing to try and quell his supporters’ violent raid of Congress, even when members of his inner circle asked him to.

“For 187 minutes, Trump resisted entreaties to intervene from advisers, allies and his elder daughter, as well as lawmakers under attack,” the Post’s Report.