Biden denies Trump request to keep White House visitor logs secret

Joe Biden has told the National Archives to send records of visitors to the White House to the committee investigating the Capitol insurrection, rejecting Donald Trump's claims of "executive privilege," his administration said Wednesday.

The visitor logs show "appointment information for individuals who were processed to enter the White House complex, including on January 6, 2021," the letter from White House counsel Dana Remus to the director of the National Archives, David Ferriero, said.

Trump, who was still president at the time, had argued that the records of people visiting the White House on the day his supporters stormed the Capitol in a bid to overturn the results of the election, which he lost to Biden, were subject to executive privilege.

That is a legal provision which gives the President of the United States the right to keep certain documents secret for the good of the country.

Biden disagreed.

"The President has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States, and therefore is not justified, as to these records and portions of records," Remus stated in the letter, released by the White House.

The Biden administration "voluntarily discloses such visitor logs on a monthly basis," with some limited exceptions, as did the Obama administration, Remus said.

Remus also cited a previous letter she had written to Ferriero in which she said that Congress has a "compelling need" to understand the circumstances that led to ... the most serious attack on the operations of the Federal Government since the Civil War."

"Constitutional protections of executive privilege should not be used to shield, from Congress or the public, information that reflects a clear and apparent effort to subvert the Constitution itself," that previous letter said.

The select committee investigating the Capitol attack is seeking the logs as they try to establish the role played by Trump and his officials in the insurrection.

But the former president and his inner circle are engaged in a procedural war of attrition with the committee, formed by the Democratic-dominated House of Representatives.

Time is running out: the committee is racing to publish their conclusions before the mid-term legislative elections autumn, when the Republicans could regain control of the House and bury their work.

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