It was about a month ago when Donald Trump appeared on Fox News and was asked about the investigation into the Jan. 6 attacks. “Honestly, I have nothing to hide,” the former president said. “I wasn’t involved in that.”
It was a curious response for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the larger context: Trump was in the midst of a fight to hide materials related to Jan. 6 when he said he had nothing to hide when it came to Jan. 6.
Nevertheless, the Republican’s legal efforts have consistently come up short, and last night, his troubles got a little worse. NBC News reported:
The Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected former President Donald Trump’s effort to stop the National Archives from giving the House Jan. 6 committee hundreds of pages of documents from his time in the White House…. Only Justice Clarence Thomas said the court should have granted the Trump motion to block the National Archives from handing the material over while the case is under review.
It’s worth emphasizing that this was not a ruling on the merits of the broader legal dispute; this was the high court’s response to Trump’s emergency appeal, intended to block Congress from receiving the Jan. 6 materials the former president has tried to hide.
As the public learned of the Supreme Court’s one-paragraph announcement, Democratic Rep. Bennie Thompson and Republican Rep. Liz Cheney — the chair and vice chair, respectively, of the Jan. 6 committee — jointly celebrated the developments and offered an update on their progress.
“The Select Committee has already begun to receive records that the former President had hoped to keep hidden and we look forward to additional productions regarding this important information,” Thompson and Cheney said.
For those who may need a refresher about how we arrived at this point, it was in October when the bipartisan House committee requested extensive materials from the White House, prompting Trump to demand absolute secrecy.
In fact, the former president and his team have tried to exert “executive privilege” to block the select committee’s requests. As NBC News recently noted, as a matter of tradition, sitting presidents have shielded White House materials at the request of their predecessors. But not this time: President Joe Biden and his team concluded that there were “unique and extraordinary circumstances” surrounding the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol.
Trump and his team sued both the committee and the National Archives, which houses presidential records.
In November, a federal district court ruled against the Republican, reminding him, “Presidents are not kings.” A month later, a unanimous federal appeals court came to the same conclusion.
And now, a majority of the Supreme Court agreed not to intervene as investigators get their first look at the materials Trump didn’t want them to see.
A Politico report added, “The ruling may be the most significant moment yet for the Jan. 6 select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol. It will help the panel connect dots between Trump’s efforts to stoke disinformation about the 2020 election results and his awareness of the threat of violence posed by the groups that heeded his call to descend on Washington. They’ll also reveal details about what actions he took as the mob of his supporters surrounded and breached the Capitol, overrunning law enforcement and sending Congress fleeing for safety.”
For more on the implications of this, I hope you caught Rachel’s interview last night with The New York Times’ Linda Greenhouse.
