Small number of Trump-era White House documents set to be turned over to January
As the agency that holds all of the Trump White House records, the Archives notified the courts of the imminent turnover in a filing on Tuesday night.
The Supreme Court has not yet acted.
Even though Trump has not won in lower courts, the appellate court in DC has blocked the release of three tranches of documents pending action from the Supreme Court. The handful of pages the Archives is set to turn over Wednesday are part of a fourth tranche of records.
The Biden administration says it believes those records aren’t covered by Trump’s lawsuit, according to the Tuesday filing. The administration had given Trump a 30-day window to try to convince a court to keep the four pages of records secret, and that window expires Wednesday.
“Because the former President has not obtained such an injunction from any court, the release will proceed as scheduled absent an intervening court order,” the administration wrote in the filing.
The documents are set to go to the House committee at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, according to the filing. It’s not clear what those four pages include.
An attorney for Trump, Jesse Binnall, responded defiantly in court early Wednesday to the Archives’ plan to release four pages to the House.
He said Trump’s team would seek to hold the Biden administration in contempt of court if documents are turned over Wednesday at 6 p.m. ET.
The lawyer also wrote that Trump’s team believed the Biden administration was acting in bad faith.
He accused the administration of planning to hand over to the House duplicates of records that are were processed earlier and clearly part of Trump’s ongoing lawsuit before the Supreme Court, before Trump’s team stepped in. The Biden administration said in its filing yesterday those records would not be handed over, instead reducing the amount headed to the House from six to four pages.
“Under no circumstances should the government’s misconduct and attempt to create an ad hoc record be sanctioned by this Court,” Binnall wrote, according to the strongly worded filing. “The weighty issues being considered by the Supreme Court should be decided under the normal course, not by the government’s attempt to bypass a lawful injunction.”
The documents include activity logs, schedules, speech notes and three pages of handwritten notes from then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows — paperwork that could reveal goings-on inside the West Wing as Trump supporters gathered in Washington and then overran the Capitol, disrupting the certification of the 2020 vote.
Trump is also seeking to keep secret a draft proclamation honoring two police officers who died in the siege and memos and other documents about supposed election fraud and efforts to overturn Trump’s loss of the presidency, the National Archives has said in court documents.
Broadly, the Trump White House records could answer some of the most closely guarded facts of what happened between Trump and other high-level officials, including those under siege on Capitol Hill on January 6.
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