(Trends Wide) — A federal appeals court on Thursday granted former President Donald Trump’s request to pause the delivery of key White House records during his presidency to the select committee of the House of Representatives investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. United States, while appealing a lower court decision that it cannot claim executive privilege to keep them secret.
The US Court of Appeals for the Washington City Circuit set the presentation of arguments for a hearing on November 30. Justices Patricia Millett and Robert Wilkins, both appointed by Obama, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, appointed by Biden, preside over the appeal panel considering Trump’s request.
“The purpose of this administrative injunction is to protect the jurisdiction of the court to address the plaintiff’s claims of executive privilege and is not to be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of the petition,” the panel wrote in a brief two-way sentence. pages.
The former president’s appeal had been a last-ditch effort before Friday’s 6 p.m. ET deadline for the House committee to receive 46 records, including White House call logs, visitation logs, drafts of the speeches and three handwritten memos from then-Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows.
In all, the National Archives was expected to release more than 700 documents from Trump’s presidency in the coming weeks.
Judge Tanya Chutkan twice rejected Trump’s request for an injunction to prevent the National Archives from complying with the request for documents, noting in a ruling late Wednesday that Trump’s lawyers did not present new or new legal arguments. made to alter its earlier ruling that executive privilege belongs to the office, not the individual. “In this appeal, the Court will consider novel and important first-impression constitutional issues regarding the separation of powers, presidential records and executive privilege,” Trump’s attorneys wrote Thursday.
Chutkan wrote in a ruling Tuesday: “Presidents are not kings, and the plaintiff is not president.”
The former president filed a lawsuit last month in Washington City District Court, claiming executive privilege and asserting that the House’s requests for documents are “unprecedented in breadth and scope” and illegitimate.
The Biden White House has refused to intervene to block access to Trump’s records. The Biden administration has said in a presentation to Chutkan that Trump, as a former president, “has no vested interest in the records,” and that Biden’s White House decision to allow these presidential records to reach Congress must be upheld.
On Wednesday, the House committee wrote that it needs Trump’s White House records quickly so it can further investigate the attack on Congress.
“The potential harm to the public is immense: our democratic institutions and a central feature of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power, are at stake,” the commission wrote. It added that a delay will hamper its ability to “complete a comprehensive investigation in a timely manner and recommend effective remedial legislation.”
– Chandelis Duster and Katelyn Polantz contributed to this report.