Trump Asserts Executive Privilege As Private Citizen, Reasoning That The Presidency Belongs To Him Wherever He Happens To Be Standing

The Filing

WASHINGTON. Citing the solemn confidentiality that must forever shroud the deliberations of the Oval Office, former President Donald Trump filed suit Monday to prevent the sitting president from releasing records describing what Trump did while he himself was the sitting president.

The complaint, filed in U.S. District Court against the National Archives, Archivist David Ferriero, the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack, and committee chairman Bennie Thompson, asked a federal judge to affirm that Trump still personally controls whether his White House records stay secret. Legal scholars noted that this control normally belongs to the president, a position Trump had not held since January and one currently occupied by a man who had already decided the records could come out.

The materials at issue include Trump's call logs, daily schedules, visitor records, and the handwritten notes of aides from the hours surrounding the assault on the Capitol. President Joe Biden, reviewing the documents as the person to whom the privilege now actually belongs, declined to shield them. Trump's attorneys responded that releasing the files would inflict lasting harm on the institution of the presidency, an institution they characterized as imperiled chiefly by the congressional effort to find out what had recently happened inside it.

"The Committee's request amounts to nothing less than a vexatious, illegal fishing expedition," the complaint read, describing an investigation "designed to unconstitutionally investigate President Trump and his administration" and referring throughout to its plaintiff by a title he had surrendered nine months earlier. A source close to the legal team clarified that executive privilege attaches not to whoever happens to be running the executive branch at a given moment but to Trump himself, in the manner of a monogram.

In November, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected the theory, observing that presidents are not kings and that the plaintiff was not president. The U.S. Court of Appeals agreed in December, and in January the Supreme Court declined to intervene, clearing the records to flow to the very committee Trump had sued to stop.

At press time, Trump had filed an emergency motion asserting executive privilege over the lawsuit, the courthouse, and the concept of executive privilege itself.

Who Benefits

§Donald Trump, who bought months of delay before investigators could reconstruct his conduct around January 6 and turned each filing and each loss into fresh evidence for the persecution narrative at the center of his fundraising.
§Former aides such as Mark Meadows, whose notes, logs, and schedules stayed out of the committee's hands while the appeals ran their course.
§The Save America PAC and the broader small-dollar fundraising operation, which monetized the fight at every stage regardless of its odds in court.
§Trump's attorneys, who billed substantial hours litigating a privilege claim most constitutional scholars considered doomed from the moment it was filed.
§Future officeholders, handed an attempted precedent for treating the records of public power as a private possession to be locked away after leaving office.

Sourced to the public record · presented without editorial embellishment