Former US President Donald Trump appealed to the Supreme Court this Thursday to block access to the White House documentation related to the assault on the Capitol on January 6, which has been requested by the special commission of the House of Representatives investigating what happened those days.
The magnate’s legal team maintains that the attempts of this parliamentary commission to obtain the requested records “improperly” are subject to President Trump’s interest in obtaining a review of the case “before it suffers irreparable damage,” so it has requested that until a decision is made, they block access to all this documentation.
This commission has claimed the communications of both senior officials close to Trump, as well as those that took place within the walls of the White House the days before and after the insurrection of January 6 in order to define the degree of involvement that he had the former president in all these events.
The investigation highlights the slogans launched at the gates of the White House by Trump in a rally prior to the assault, from which he harangued his followers to go to the Capitol to “fight” against electoral fraud, while the congressmen were at that time carrying out the recount of the electoral votes that confirmed his defeat in the November elections against the now president, Joe Biden.
Since October Trump has tried to claim executive privilege over these documents, which should, as he himself maintains, be kept secret “in perpetuity” and claiming that in any case they let him review the records before leaving them in the hands of Congress, which could take years.
The lawsuit imposed by Trump opens a complex legal battle over congressional investigations and executive privilege. The Supreme Court recognized during the Richard Nixon era that former presidents may have a legitimate interest in preventing the release of documentation, but Trump’s would be the first dispute between an incumbent president and his predecessor in this regard.
