Biden clears way for investigators to obtain Trump’s Jan. 6 White House visitor logs

President Joe Biden has rejected Donald Trump’s effort to assert executive privilege over White House visitor logs from Jan. 6, 2021, ordering the National Archives to deliver the documents to congressional investigators in two weeks.

“As a matter of policy, and subject to limited exceptions, the Biden Administration voluntarily discloses such visitor logs on a monthly basis. The Obama Administration followed the same practice,” White House Counsel Dana Remus said in a letter to National Archivist David Ferriero dated Feb. 15.

“The majority of the entries over which the former President has asserted executive privilege would be publicly released under current policy,” Remus wrote. “As practice under that policy demonstrates, preserving the confidentiality of this type of record generally is not necessary to protect long-term institutional interests of the Executive Branch.”

The decision to reject Trump’s effort to assert executive privilege over those logs is the latest move by Biden to support the investigation of the House Jan. 6 select committee probing Trump’s effort to subvert the 2020 election — and the violent riot at the Capitol that ensued when his effort failed.

Biden has already rejected a string of executive privilege claims over other Trump White House materials, like briefing memos, speech drafts and call records stretching from April 2020 to Jan. 20, 2021. Trump previously sued to prevent the Archives from disclosing the documents to Congress, but he lost a series of court battles, including before the Supreme Court, that resulted in hundreds of pages being delivered to the select committee.

It’s unclear if Trump will launch another court action to prevent the newly identified records from reaching lawmakers. It’s also unclear how the new tranche of records differs from earlier ones that were the subject of Trump’s lawsuit.

According to the National Archives, one of Trump’s rejected privilege assertions included 46 pages of “daily presidential diaries, schedules, appointments showing White House visitors, activity logs, call logs, and switchboard shift-change checklists showing phone calls to the President and Vice President, all specifically for or encompassing January 6, 2021.”