The deferral is in response to concerns by the Biden White House that releasing all the Trump administration documents sought by the committee could compromise national security and executive privilege.
WASHINGTON — The House committee investigating the Jan.6 insurrection at the Capitol has agreed to defer its attempt to get hundreds of pages of records from the Trump administration, holding off at the request of the Biden White House. The deferral is in response to concerns by the Biden White House that releasing all the Trump administration documents sought by the committee could compromise national security and executive privilege. President Biden has repeatedly rejected former President Trump’s blanket efforts to cite executive privilege to block the release of documents surrounding that day. But Biden’s White House is still working with the committee to shield some documents from being turned over. Trump is appealing to the Supreme Court to try to block the National Archives and Records Administration, which maintains custody of the documents from his time in office, from giving them to the committee. The agreement to keep some Trump-era records away from the committee is memorialized in a Dec.16 letter from the White House counsel’s office. It mostly shields records that do not involve the events of Jan.6 but were covered by the committee’s sweeping request for documents from the Trump White House about the events of that day. Dozen of pages created Jan.6 don’t pertain to the assault on the Capitol. Other documents involve sensitive preparations and deliberations by the National Security Council. Biden’s officials were worried that if those pages were turned over to Congress, that would set a troublesome precedent for the executive branch, no matter who is president. Still other documents are highly classified and the White House asked Congress to work with the federal agencies that created them to discuss their release.
