Biden allows Jan. 6 panel access to Trump’s White House visitor logs
WASHINGTON – The House committee investigating the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol will receive Donald Trump’s White House visitor logs, after President Joe Biden waived executive privilege for the documents.
The move will allow the committee to see who was visiting the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, as a mob of Trump supporters ransacked the Capitol. The panel is piecing together a minute-by-minute account of what happened that day, in an effort to prevent future attacks.
The committee is scheduled to receive the logs within 15 days.
Biden’s waiver follows a similar move Oct. 8, when he allowed the release of hundreds of pages of Trump-era presidential documents to the committee. Trump had asserted executive privilege to keep hundreds of pages of documents confidential and filed a federal lawsuit to prevent their release.
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But federal district and appeals courts approved the release, saying Biden’s waiver outweighed Trump’s claim, and the Supreme Court refused to prevent their release.
National Archivist David Ferriero told Biden that Trump had asserted executive privilege Jan. 31 over the visitor logs. But Dana Remus, Biden’s White House counsel, replied in a letter Tuesday that the president waived privilege for the logs.
“The President has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States, and therefore is not justified, as to these records and portions of records,” Remus wrote.
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Contributing: The Associated Press
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