(FreedomBeacon.com)- The Supreme Court dealt former President Donald Trump what appears to be a final blow in his fight to keep some records from his time in the White House a secret.
On Tuesday, the high court formally rejected an appeal from the former president who was seeking to keep the records from being released to the House’s special committee investigating the events of January 6, 2021.
The most recent order follows the Supreme Court’s similar January 19 order that allowed the documents to be turned over to the House committee. The National Archives had been handling those documents ever since Trump left the White House.
On December 9, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a ruling from a lower court that said Trump didn’t have a basis to challenge the decision by current President Joe Biden to allow those records to be turned over to the committee. Trump had initially invoked executive privilege to try to keep those documents secret, but Biden denied to exercise that for his predecessor.
Following that ruling from the district court, Trump appealed to the high court, hoping for a different outcome — or at least a delay in the process of handing over the documents. At the very least, he was successful in the latter part of that, as the committee only this week was given the go-ahead to get the documents.
The House committee has for months been seeking to gain access to many documents related to Trump’s time in the White House. In response, Trump and many of his allies have been waging a legal battle almost right from the beginning, as they have sought to block the committee from gaining access to the documents and also witnesses they have been seeking.
One of the ways in which Trump has attempted to block this access is through what’s called executive privilege. This legal principle allows current and former presidents to protect the ultimate confidentiality of selections of internal communications at the White House.
Some of Trump’s allies have invoked this privilege in response to being subpoenaed by the House committee — including Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows, who was the former chief of staff at the White House. Bannon has since been formally charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to comply with the subpoena, while Meadows may go down that path as well.
Lower courts have rejected Trump’s claims to executive privilege, and the Supreme Court finally agreed with them this week when they denied Trump’s request to take up his challenge.
Members of the committee have been saying they need to have access to all of these records so they can understand what role, if any, Trump had in encouraging — actively or passively — the violence that occurred on January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol building.
Among the documents the House committee has been seeking include phone records, visitor logs to the White House, as well as written communications that took place between some of Trump’s advisers.
