Whoomp there it is! Just as I predicted.
Breaking news from the Washington Post, Trump White House records can be released in Jan. 6 probe pending Supreme Court review, appeals court rules:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Thursday ruled against former president Donald Trump’s bid to keep his White House documents secret from a congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, potentially setting up an emergency review by the Supreme Court. [The shadow docket.]
There is no legally justifiable reason for the Supreme Court to review this case. The District Court and Court of Appeals opinions are well reasoned and based upon prior Supreme Court precedents (the Nixon cases). The privilege is qualified. The crime-fraud exception to executive privilege eviscerates the privilege. There cannot be executive privilege for a president to engage in the high crimes of sedition, insurrection and treason, and then hide his criminality behind an assertion of executive privilege. If the Supreme Court grants review in this case, it will be the most partisan political move since Bush v. Gore.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld a lower court’s opinion, which said that in a dispute between a current and past president over whether to release White House records, the sitting president must prevail.
Judges Patricia A. Millett, Robert L. Wilkins and Ketanji Brown Jackson denied Trump’s request for a preliminary injunction blocking the National Archives and Records Administration from releasing the first roughly 800 pages of disputed Trump papers after President Biden declined to assert executive privilege as requested by his predecessor, setting up the first of its kind constitutional controversy.
The court stayed the opinion 14 days for Trump’s legal team to appeal to the Supreme Court, as they requested at a Nov. 30 hearing in case of adverse ruling.
“Benjamin Franklin said, at the founding, that we have ‘[a] Republic’—’if [we] can keep it.’” The events of January 6th exposed the fragility of those democratic institutions and traditions that we had perhaps come to take for granted,” Millett wrote a unanimous 68-page-opinion. “In response, the President of the United States and Congress have each made the judgment that access to this subset of presidential communication records is necessary to address a matter of great constitutional moment for the Republic. Former President Trump has given this court no legal reason to cast aside President Biden’s assessment of the Executive Branch interests at stake, or to create a separation of powers conflict that the Political Branches have avoided.”
“What Mr. Trump seeks is to have an Article III court intervene and nullify those judgments of the President and Congress, delay the Committee’s work, and derail the negotiations and accommodations that the Political Branches have made,” the appeals court said. “But essential to the rule of law is the principle that a former President must meet the same legal standards for obtaining preliminary injunctive relief as everyone else. And former President Trump has failed that task.”
If the Supreme Court does not grant review, it is game over for Donald Trump’s obstruction of Congress. The January 6 Committee will get all the documents that it has requested from the National Archives and other sources for its investigation.
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