Barring a court order, the National Archives is expected to turn over Trump’s call logs, draft speeches and other documents related to the rebellion on Friday.
Former President Donald Trump has asked a federal appeals court to temporarily block a House committee investigating the January 6 uprising led by his supporters from releasing records.
Trump’s lawyers on Thursday requested the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to grant a temporary injunction. Barring a court order, the National Archives is expected to turn over Trump’s call logs, draft speeches and other documents related to the rebellion on Friday. Trump’s lawyers asked the court to set a schedule for the case that would delay any decisions until next week.
Congress is seeking records to better understand the January 6 attack on the Capitol, in which rioters ransacked the building and forced President Joe Biden to hide the lawmakers who testified to Mr Trump’s election loss.
Mr Biden waived executive privileges on documents. Mr Trump then went to court arguing that as a former president, he still has the right to have privileges on record and that releasing them would harm a future presidency.
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Tuesday dismissed those arguments, saying “the president is not the king, and the plaintiffs are not the president.” He again denied an emergency offer by Trump on Wednesday.
In an appeals court filing, Mr Trump’s lawyers wrote that without restraint, the former president was “through effective denial of a constitutional and statutory right to be heard fully on a serious disagreement between a former and incumbent president”. will suffer irreparable loss.”
The White House on Thursday also informed an attorney for Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows that Biden would waive any executive privileges that would prevent Mr Meadows from cooperating with the committee, according to a letter obtained by the AP. The committee has summoned Meadows and more than two dozen others as part of its investigation.
His attorney, George Terwilliger, issued a statement in response, saying that Meadows “remains under former President Trump’s instructions to respect longstanding principles of executive privilege.” “It now appears that the courts will have to resolve this conflict,” Terwilliger said.
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