By Lawrence Hurley
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected former President Donald Trump's request to block the release of White House records sought by the Democratic-led congressional panel investigating last year's deadly attack on the Capitol by a mob of his supporters.
The decision means the documents, held by a federal agency that stores government and historical records, can be disclosed even as litigation over the matter continues in lower courts.
Only one of the court's nine members, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, publicly noted disagreement with the decision.
Trump's request to the justices came after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on December 9 ruled that the businessman-turned-politician had no basis to challenge President Joe Biden's decision to allow the records to be handed over to the House Select Committee.
Trump and his allies have waged an ongoing legal battle with the committee seeking to block access to documents and witnesses. Trump has sought to invoke a legal principle known as executive privilege, which protects the confidentially of some internal White House communications, a stance rejected by lower courts.
The brief Supreme Court order noted that the weighty question of whether a former president can assert an executive privilege claim did not need to be answered to resolve the case.
"Because the court of appeals concluded that President Trump's claims would have failed even if he were the incumbent, his status as a former president necessarily made no difference to the court's decision," the unsigned order said.
The House committee has said it needs the records to understand any role Trump may have played in fomenting the violence that unfolded on January' 6, 2021. His supporters stormed the Capitol in a failed bid to prevent Congress from formally certifying Biden's 2020 presidential election victory over Trump.
The committee has asked the National Archives, which holds Trump's White House records, to produce visitor logs, phone records and written communications between his advisers.
Biden, who took office two weeks after the riot, has determined that the records, which belong to the executive branch, should not be subject to executive privilege and that turning them over to Congress was in the best interests of the nation. Trump has argued that he can invoke executive privilege based on the fact he was president at the time even though he is no longer in office.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Novembe 9 rejected Trump's arguments, saying he had not acknowledged the "deference owed" to Biden's determination that the committee could access the records and adding: "Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President."
The select committee is comprised of seven Democrats and two Republicans. The Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative majority includes three justices appointed by Trump, but it has not always been receptive to his requests.
The court last year rejected his request to block disclosure of his tax records as part of a criminal investigation in New York and also turned away attempts by Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election.
Shortly before the riot, Trump repeated to a crowd of his supporters his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him through widespread voting fraud, telling them to go to the Capitol and "fight like hell" to "stop the steal."
Any delay by the Supreme Court in allowing the disclosure of the records could have imperiled the panel's chances of obtaining them. The committee aims to finish its work before the November congressional elections in which Trump's fellow Republicans are seeking to regain House control. Republicans opposed the panel's creation and could shut down the inquiry if they win a majority in the chamber.
(Reporting by Lawrence Hurley; Editing by Will Dunham)
Trump Doubles Down On Racist Tweets Against Congresswomen
If you try to defend President Donald Trump, you will always end up having the rug pulled out from underneath you. It’s a law of nature.
And yet, so many of the president’s allies have failed to learn this simple lesson. So when Trump launched a new attack at progressive Democratic lawmakers that was one of his most obviously racist smears, inevitably, some of his defenders tried to deny the obvious truth.
His screed attacked a group of women who have come to define the left wing of the Democratic caucus, which includes Reps. Ilhan Omar (MN), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Rashida Talib (MI), and Ayanna Pressley (MA). Though only Omar is an immigrant (she was a refugee from Somalia as a child), Trump seemed to assume all four women of color weren’t born in the United States, and most egregiously, he suggested they should “go back” to other countries:
Matt Wolking, a deputy director of communications for the president’s re-election campaign, was one of the first to defend the president, by bizarrely claiming he didn’t say what he said.
Of course, saying “go back to your country and then come back” includes the statement “go back to your country,” so his statement was absurd on its face. To read the argument as generously as possible, though, Woking might have been trying to argue that Trump’s statement couldn’t echo to the racist trope of white Americans telling minorities to “go back to their country,” because that trope doesn’t usually include an invitation to return. However, even this argument is clearly nonsense, because there’s no reason Trump’s claim that the congresswomen should “help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came” and then “come back and show us how it is done” should be seen as anything but disingenuous.
First of all, most of the women that he’s clearly referring to were born in the United States, so there’s nowhere for them to “go back” to. They are fighting to improve the only country they’ve lived in. Second, even telling someone like Omar, a refugee, that she owes more allegiance to “fix” the country her family fled as a child is still patently racist. And the idea that we should take Trump seriously when he says he would want to learn from Omar if she were able to “fix” Somalia’s problems is so ridiculous that Wolking should be ashamed to ever speak publicly about politics ever again.
But even more humiliating for Wolking is that on Monday, Trump decided to annihilate even this tissue paper-thin defense of Trump’s tweets.
“These are people that hate our country,” Trump said at the White House. “They hate our country. They hate it, I think, with a passion.”
He continued: “If somebody has a problem with our country, if somebody doesn’t want to be in our country, they should leave.” He said nothing about them “coming back.” (And of course, this is completely hypocritical, as Trump has been extremely critical of the United States in recent years. In 2015, he literally published a book called “Crippled America” — and yet no one thought the fact that he had criticisms of the country meant he should find somewhere else to live.)
And CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out that Trump’s new comments also undercut the defense from Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD). Harris said Trump’s tweets were “clearly not racist” and the congresswomen to “go back to the district they came from — to the neighborhood they came from.”
Of course, Trump’s original tweets and his doubling down on the remarks make it clear that this isn’t at all what Trump meant.