Trump wants to prevent the US National Archives – which holds these documents – from handing them over to the congressional committee investigating the Capitol invasion.
The exact contents of these documents are unknown – assuming they are emails, draft letters and visitor records – but the House committee believes they may reveal exactly what happened in the White House during the attack on Capitol Hill.
Two weeks ago, a federal appeals court ruled against Trump’s intentions, but it still prohibits the delivery of National Archives documents to Congress without a Supreme Court ruling on the matter.
Trump now claims that, as a former president, he has the right to claim executive privileges over these documents, claiming that their release would harm the future US presidency.
However, the current president, Joe Biden, has already decided that the documents are in the public interest and that executive privilege should not be invoked.
The Congressional Committee of Inquiry has already said these documents are necessary to understand what happened in the attack on Capitol Hill, as Trump supporters sought to boycott the validation of the results of the 2020 presidential election, which gave Biden the victory.
