The battle over Donald Trump’s White House records came to an end on Tuesday, with the Supreme Court rejecting his appeal. The highly partisan J6 Committee will now be able to access the records they are seeking as part of their “investigation.”
Trump and several of his allies have invoked executive privilege to refuse to provide documents or testimony to the committee. However, executive privilege can only be asserted by an incumbent president, and Joe Biden has repeatedly rejected Trump’s claims of executive privilege over the documents. Trump sued to block the release of the documents, claiming that the committee has no legitimate need for the documents they were requesting—many of which have nothing to do with the Capitol riot.
“President Biden has refused to assert executive privilege over numerous clearly privileged documents requested by the Committee,” Trump’s lawsuit read. “The Committee’s request amounts to nothing less than a vexatious, illegal fishing expedition openly endorsed by Biden and designed to unconstitutionally investigate President Trump and his administration. Our laws do not permit such an impulsive, egregious action against a former President and his close advisors.”
So far, despite all the efforts of the J6 Committee, they’ve never been able to prove it was an insurrection. As PJM’s Robert Spencer reported at the time, in December, texts released by the committee proved the opposite.
The J6 Committee insists it needs the White House documents to understand what role Trump may have played in the Capitol riot—of course, he played no role—though, given the committee’s history of lying about the information they have so far, it seems inevitable that they will make more false claims about the documents they’ll be getting now.
In December, Biden did say he would limit the documents that would be made available to the committee, after suddenly realizing that releasing all the Trump administration documents the J6 Committee had requested would “set a troublesome precedent for the executive branch, no matter who is president.”
Now that the Supreme Court has rejected the appeal, the only person who can stop the release of the documents is Joe Biden, and there’s no reason to believe that he will. Despite limiting access to some of the documents, Joe Biden’s failure to invoke executive privilege will most certainly come back to bite him.
“An incumbent administration does not have the constitutional authority to unilaterally waive the executive privilege of a previous administration—especially one so recent,” Trump Communications Director Taylor Budowich said in a statement in October. “If it did, then executive privilege doesn’t exist, including for Joe Biden.”
With Republicans expected to regain the majority in November, and Trump likely to run for president in 2024, Joe Biden now opens himself up to the risk that Trump and a Republican majority will launch a slew of investigations, during which Biden’s White House documents will be an open book, thanks to the precedent he set by not asserting executive privilege over his predecessor’s White House communications.
And he’ll deserve everything that comes from it.