Sylvie Claire / February 16, 2022
Joe Biden has requested that White House visitor logs, including the day of the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, be turned over to the House Select Committee on Investigations into those events, the White House said Wednesday, rejecting former President Donald Trump's arguments.
The latter believed that these records were subject to executive privilege, a legal provision that gives the president of the United States the right to keep certain documents secret for the good of the country. This is not the opinion of the current U.S. president: Joe Biden has concluded that applying 'executive privilege' is not in the best interest of the United States, wrote White House counsel Dana Remus to the director of the National Archives in a letter released by the White House. She recalls in this letter that the Biden administration publishes on its own the visitor records each month, with limited exceptions and recalls that it was the same during the presidency of Barack Obama.
The House Select Committee on the Events of January 6, 2021 hopes the lists will shed light on the role played by Donald Trump and his official entourage as a crowd of the former president's supporters stormed the U.S. Congress. Donald Trump and his entourage are engaged in a procedural war of attrition with this special committee of the House of Representatives, composed mostly of Democrats. Time is running out for these parliamentarians: they want to publish their conclusions at all costs before the mid-term legislative elections next fall, when the Republicans could regain control of the House and bury their work.