Donald Trump makes last-ditch effort to keep White House records secret | US Capitol attack

The ex-president’s lawyers this week tried and failed to persuade district judge Tanya Chutkan to put on hold her ruling that allows a House of Representatives committee investigating the attack to access phone records, visitor logs and other documents.

Now, with time running out, Trump’s hopes are pinned on the influential US court of appeals for the District of Columbia in Washington. His legal team have asked it to overturn Chutkan’s ruling and stop the National Archives handing over the first documents on Friday.

As is customary, the DC circuit court will randomly assign three judges to a panel to consider the appeal. If they decline to issue a preliminary injunction, Trump is expected to appeal to the supreme court through its “shadow docket”, which allows justices to quickly decide emergency matters without full briefs and arguments.

It is not the first time in a long business and political career that he has used delaying tactics in the legal process to his own advantage. The Democratic-led bipartisan committee faces a potential deadline of winding up its investigation before next November’s midterm elections in which Republicans are tipped to win back control of the House of Representatives.

Trump has argued that the materials requested by the committee were covered by a legal doctrine known as executive privilege that protects the confidentiality of some White House communications.

He called the House committee’s request a “vexatious, illegal fishing expedition” that was “untethered from any legitimate legislative purpose”.

But Chutkan, in her Tuesday ruling, rejected that argument, in a clear win for congressional oversight powers. “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President,” she said of Trump.

The House select committee has said it needs the requested materials to understand the role Trump may have played in fomenting the riot in which his supporters aimed to block members of Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s presidential win, despite the 2020 contest being widely declared the most secure election in US history.

According to an earlier court filing from the archives, the records include call logs, drafts of remarks and speeches and handwritten notes from Trump’s then chief of staff, Mark Meadows. There are also copies of talking points from the then press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, and “a draft Executive Order on the topic of election integrity”, the National Archives has said.

Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat who leads the House committee, said in a statement after Tuesday’s ruling that the records were crucial for understanding the attack and “in my view, there couldn’t be a more compelling public interest than getting answers about an attack on our democracy”.

The committee has already interviewed more than 150 witnesses and issued more than 30 subpoenas, including on Tuesday to McEnany and the former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller.

Four people died during the 6 January attack on the Capitol by extremist Trump supporters – one shot dead by police and the other three of natural causes, including one trampled by the mob – and more than a hundred police officers were injured.

A Capitol Police officer who had been attacked by protesters died the next day and four other police officers who defended the Capitol later died by suicide.

About 700 people have been arrested for their involvement in the attack and many of the cases are still working their way through the courts.

Carl Tobias, Williams chair in law at the University of Richmond, Virginia, said: “Trump’s entire effort appears to be right out of his playbook. Trump obstructs and delays in apparent attempts to prevent the Congress and the courts from discharging their constitutional duties.”

He added: “In this, as in so many other prior gambits, Trump apparently wants to run out the clock in the hopes that the 2022 elections will yield GOP House and Senate majorities that will halt congressional investigation of his role in the January 6 insurrection.”

After leaving office, Trump was impeached for a historic second time, charged with inciting the insurrection. He was acquitted by the US Senate but seven Republican senators were among the majority who voted to convict but fell short of the two-thirds required.