Biden blocks Trump's claim of executive privilege over visitor logs
President Biden has rejected another effort from former President Donald Trump to withold White House records from the committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, CNN reports.
Biden instead directed the National Archives to provide the select committee with the documents they seek, this time including the former administration's White House visitor logs (including those from Jan. 6, 2021). Biden's White House counsel Dana Remus said Trump's logs were not subject to executive privilege, as the former president had claimed, and should be handed over to investigators within 15 days, per The New York Times.
It is unclear what the former administration's logs might reveal to the select committee, CNN notes.
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In her letter to the Archives, Remus noted that Biden's visitor logs are public, as were former President Barack Obama's. The Trump White House said in April 2017 that such records should remain confidential for matters of national security, which made it "far harder to determine which donors, lobbyists and activists had access" to Trump and his aides, the Times writes.
"The majority of the entries over which the former President has asserted executive privilege would be publicly released under current policy," Remus wrote, per CNN.
Biden has previously rejected Trump's claims of executive privilege relating to other White House documents and records requested by the committee. Trump took the issue to federal court and lost.
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