WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump has filed a double-barreled lawsuit seeking to block any handover of documents the committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot has sought from the National Archives.
The suit names both the committee and the Archives as defendants. It says the committee’s subpoena is invalid because it has no power of investigation. And it says the material should be protected by executive privilege.
The House committee requested documents in March and August from Archives that it said were related to the Trump administration’s actions before, during, and after the January 6 riot at the Capitol, when a group of the former president’s supporters attacked the building in hopes of blocking his electoral defeat. Trump notified the archives that he formally asserted executive privilege.
President Joe Biden, however, concluded that the privilege should not apply. The White House Counsel, Dana Remus, said the documents “shed light on events within the White House on and about January 6 and bear on the Select Committee’s need to understand the facts underlying the most serious attack on the operations of the Federal government since the Civil War.”
Trump’s lawsuit described the Biden administration’s waiver as “a myopic, political maneuver designed to maintain the support of its political rivals.”
The Trump lawsuit also said the committee’s request for documents is far too broad, describing it as “almost limitless in scope” and in many aspects “with no reasonable connection to the events of that day.” It argued, as did several Trump lawsuits during the time he was in office, that Congress can obtain information only for the purposes of legislating, since it has no general power of investigation.
The lawsuit was filed by an Alexandria, Va. lawyer, Jesse Binnall, who is representing the former president in four civil lawsuits filed over the Jan. 6 riot. He joined Texas attorney Sidney Powell in representing Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser. And he represented Trump in an unsuccessful lawsuit seeking to overturn Biden’s victory in Nevada.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
