Former President Donald Trump just took a massive loss with the Supreme Court. He can no longer prevent the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th Capitol riots from accessing key Jan. 6 documents. Making matters worse for the twice-impeached one-term President, the ruling was 8-1, with only Clarence Thomas dissenting and none of the Justices he nominated for the high court.
The highest court in the land ruled that a former president could not invoke executive privilege on White House records if the current President did not assert that privilege. Joe Biden has made it clear that he will not shelter Trump from being held accountable for his actions.
“The questions whether and in what circumstances a former president may obtain a court order preventing disclosure of privileged records from his tenure in office, in the face of a determination by the incumbent president to waive the privilege, are unprecedented and raise serious and substantial concerns,” the court wrote. “The Court of Appeals, however, had no occasion to decide these questions because it analyzed and rejected President Trump’s privilege claims ‘under any of the tests [he] advocated.”
“Because the Court of Appeals concluded that President Trump’s claims would have failed even if he were the incumbent, his status as a former President necessarily made no difference to the court’s decision,” the court wrote.
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According to The Hill, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump nominee, who agreed with the majority’s ruling, wrote separately to note his disagreement with part of the lower appeals court’s reasoning and its prospective legal weight.
#BREAKING: With only Justice Thomas publicly dissenting, #SCOTUS rules against former President Trump; refuses to stop National Archives from turning over four tranches of Trump presidential records to the January 6 Committee. pic.twitter.com/UugvbjQ0DG
— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) January 19, 2022
Justice Thomas did not explain his reason for dissenting. The Jan. 6 committee investigating the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol has not established a specific deadline for completing the panel’s probe. Still, its chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), has said the committee hopes to wrap up by early spring.
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
