Former President Donald Trump recently announced that he would be suing the US House Capitol Riot Committee, as well as the National Archives Committee, for harassing him with a biased investigation. He emphasized that the committee was too focused on the January 6th Capitol protests than the discrepancies of the November 2020 election. Not to mention, Capitol protesters are in jail for breaking a few windows while Antifa/Black Lives Matter members acted out violently last summer without any consequences.
Lawyers for Trump filed a lawsuit against the House select committee for investigating the Capitol riot and even asked the federal judge to stop the National Archives from handing over a sea of documents. While Biden has pushed for the release of certain Capitol documents, Trump has claimed executive privilege over them and said it invalidates any part of the Committee’s request. The lawyers argue that they wanted the Court to stop the Archivist from releasing any privileged records until Trump is able to review all of the requested materials.
Trump went on to say that the committee does not have a “valid legislative purpose” for requesting so many documents and that this was nothing but a “vexatious, illegal fishing expedition.” While most people believe that Trump no longer has the power to assert any privilege over the documents, others argue that they are his to do as he pleases.
The Jan. 6 committee has already subpoenaed multiple former Trump aides including former chief of staff Mark Meadows and former administration official Kash Patel. Taylor Budowich, the Save America PAC’s direct of communications, called the investigations “hyper-partisan and illegitimate.”
The lawsuit claims that the information request is almost “limitless in scope” and that it effectively seeks every presidential record and communication that relates to or occurred on January 6, 2021. While the White House previously blocked attempts to withhold these materials, Trump is now citing executive privilege over access to them.
“The United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol (the ‘Committee’) has decided to harass President Trump and senior members of his administration (among others) by sending an illegal, unfounded, and overbroad records request to the Archivist of the United States,” the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit calls the investigation “impulsive” and “egregious” against a former President and his close advisors, adding that the law does not protect such an unconstitutional act. The Department of Justice is even trying to go after those who don’t comply with subpoenas and “hold them accountable.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki has only tweeted that the White House and President Biden support the works of the committee and “any decisions about prosecutions” that the DOJ makes.
But according to Trump and his lawyers, this is just a political maneuver for the Biden Administration on their rivals and is not based on any “discernible legal principle.” In the middle of a supply chain crisis, pandemic, and border crisis, Biden is focused on all the wrong things.