It seems that President Trump is futilely clinging to the idea that he can protect his White House documents under executive privilege. Joe Biden put his abuse of that doctrine to rest. Now Trump is going whining to the Supremes after getting no satisfaction from lower courts:
The fight over the documents stems from a lawsuit Trump filed against the Archives as well as the House Committee, seeking to stop the records’ disclosure. Trump is arguing that those documents should remain secret under the former President’s own assertions of executive privilege, though so far, lower courts have rejected his arguments. Thursday’s filing with the Supreme Court marks an escalation of the dispute, in which President Joe Biden has determined that withholding the documents based on executive privilege is not in the interest of the United States. In a letter to the National Archives in October, White House Counsel Dana A. Remus said that the President had declined to assert privilege because Congress has a “compelling need in service of its legislative functions to understand the circumstances that led to these horrific events.” In their filings with the Supreme Court Thursday, the former President’s lawyers said that the House’s request for the Trump White House documents was “untethered from any valid legislative purpose and exceeds the authority of Congress under the Constitution and the Presidential Records Act.”
The lower courts can’t really find any legal basis to find the Biden guidance troubling:
“Former President Trump has given this court no legal reason to cast aside President Biden’s assessment of the Executive Branch interests at stake, or to create a separation of powers conflict that the Political Branches have avoided,” the DC Circuit said in its opinion earlier this month.
Will his Supreme Court save him? We know for a fact that they do not simply do his bidding already, so we will see.