The House committee investigating January’s Capitol riot will defer its request for some of the Trump administration documents the committee had previously requested. The decision was not publicly announced, but can be found in a Dec. 16 letter from the White House counsel’s office. The Associated Press obtained the letter Tuesday.
The deferral is in response to White House concerns that releasing all the documents could compromise national security and executive privilege. It mostly shields records that do not involve the events of Jan. 6. Other documents involve sensitive preparations and deliberations by the National Security Council.
“The documents for which the Select Committee has agreed to withdraw or defer its request do not appear to bear on the White House’s preparations for or response to the events of January 6, or on efforts to overturn the election or otherwise obstruct the peaceful transfer of power,” White House deputy counsel Jonathan Su wrote in the letter. Biden’s officials were worried that turning those pages over to Congress would set a troublesome precedent for the executive branch, no matter who is president.
Former President Donald Trump is appealing to the Supreme Court over the entirety of the Capitol riot committee document request. The National Archives has spent the last few months sending documents to the White House and to Trump lawyers in order to determine whether the documents contain any privileged information. Trump has raised both broad objections to the release of the documents as well as specific concerns about particular documents.
Biden has repeatedly rejected Trump’s claims of executive privilege over all the documents. That message was emphasized in a letter sent Dec. 23.
“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,” White House counsel Dana Remus reiterated in the latest letter. In his letter, Su reiterated that withholding some of the documents “should not compromise [the committee’s] ability to complete its critical investigation expeditiously.”
