The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday stopped former President Donald Trump's attempt to block the release of White House records to a congressional panel investigating last year's deadly right-wing insurrection at the Capitol.
The high court's decision to formally reject Trump's appeal comes just over a month after its near-unanimous order--with Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting--paved the way for the National Archives to share more than 700 documents with the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
"We expected this to happen after the court voted 8-1 to deny Trump's request to block documents while they considered his petition for review," Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group, said on social media. "But even though it was expected, it's still good to see it happen."
Last October, President Joe Biden ordered federal record-keepers to grant the House committee access to a cache of Trump's White House documents, denying his predecessor's effort to shield the information through executive privilege.
After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in early December upheld a lower court ruling that Trump had no basis to challenge an investigation of the records, Trump appealed to the Supreme Court.
The House committee has sought visitor logs, phone records, and written communications between Trump's advisers to better understand the ex-president's role in last year's violent coup attempt.
Following a speech Trump gave at a rally outside the White House on January 6, 2021--during which he repeated his "Big Lie" that his loss in the 2020 election was the result of widespread voter fraud--a mob of his supporters stormed the halls of Congress as lawmakers attempted to certify Biden's Electoral College victory.
When Biden approved access to Trump's presidential records, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said that the current president "believes it to be of the utmost importance for both Congress and the American people to have a complete understanding of the events of that day to prevent them from happening again."
