(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden has rejected another of former President Donald Trump’s executive privilege claims, deciding that Trump White House visitor logs should be handed over to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and the effort to overturn the 2020 election — within 15 days.
A letter from Chief White House Counsel Dana Remus to the National Archives obtained by ABC states, “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,” the letter states.
The visitor logs in question, Remus writes, “are entries in visitor logs showing appointment information for individuals who were processed to enter the White House complex, including on January 6, 2021.”
The letter goes on to explain that the Biden administration routinely discloses visitor logs, as did the Obama administration, therefore “preserving the confidentiality” of the Trump logs ” is not necessary to protect long-term institutional interests of the Executive Branch.”
Many key Trump aides spent time at the White House leading up to the January 6th attack on the Capitol, including Rudy Giuliani, who was organizing the the effort to overturn election results, lawyer John Eastman, who pushed to Trump the idea that Vice President Mike Pence could stop congressional certification of the 2020 election results, and former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who frequently pushed conspiracy theories about voter fraud.
Biden likewise ordered the Archives to hand over previous batches of Trump documents, and in Tuesday’s letter regarding the visitor logs, Remus quotes Biden’s previous justifications: “Congress has a compelling need in service of its legislative functions to understand the circumstances that led to . . . the most serious attack on the operations of the Federal Government since the Civil War. . . Constitutional protections of executive privilege should not be used to shield, from Congress or the public, information that reflects a clear and apparent effort to subvert the Constitution itself.”
Trump lost a legal challenge to prevent the release of previous tranches of documents and could try again, but while that could delay a turnover, many legal experts say it is highly unlikely he would get a ruling in his favor.
ABC News’ Benjamin Siegel contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2022, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
