THE U.S. SUPREME COURT DISAGREED WITH THE FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT

 

              …Trump acting like a “Mob Boss” didn’t fly with the Supreme Court

 

Even the three justices that Trump nominated didn’t support his request

 

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) on Wednesday rejected the former president, Donald Trump’s, request to block the release of his White House records to a congressional committee investigating the January 6th, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The SCOTUS count of the nine court members was 8-1.  I guess it was no surprise that the one dissenting vote came from Justice Clarence Thomas.  With the January 6^th Committee being established by the Democratic leader of the House, Nancy Pelosi, it’s no wonder that this justice would vote against his other colleagues. Thomas has shown before where his partisan attitude is with his decisions.  

It was thought that perhaps those three justices that the then, President Trump, had nominated to the court would vote in his favor.  But even his nominees must have thought that the rule-of-law that had been responsible for President Richard Nixon to turn over his White House tapes, was precedence enough for the committee’s request for the documents.

The courts response turned aside Trump’s request to block the records’ release while the case regarding his assertion of executive privilege continues through the courts. This decision means there is no legal obstacle to release of the materials from the National Archives, which President Biden has also approved.

The White House spokesman Michael Gwin said the court’s ruling was an “important step forward” in the probe. “The former President subverted the constitution in an attempt to overturn a lawful and fair election,” Gwin said in a statement Wednesday night. “His actions represented a unique and existential threat to our democracy, and President Biden has been clear that these events require a full investigation to ensure that what we saw on January 6th can never happen again.”

This was a major victory for the House select committee, which has been pushing hard in going after Trump’s records.  They are also issuing subpoenas to Trump’s allies while focusing on the president’s actions during the Capitol insurrection.

“The Supreme Court’s action tonight is a victory for the rule of law and American democracy,” committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and vice chairwoman, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said in a joint statement. “The Select Committee has already begun to receive records that the former President had hoped to keep hidden. … Our work goes forward to uncover all the facts about the violence of January 6th and its causes.”

The records will be released to the committee, but not to the general public.

There is still a major difficult issue that the committee has to deal with, and that being how to secure any testimony from the former Vice President, Mike Pence.

As expected, the Supreme Court’s order, with only Justice Thomas dissenting, did not provide detailed reasoning for his rejecting the former president’s application.  Nor did Thomas explain why he would have granted the request. This is typical, especially for this justice.

But this was just another defeat for Trump at the Supreme Court, where he chose a third of the current sitting justices. The former president had said in the past that he is disappointed in the high court and that some of the justices lack “guts.”  This was only because they chose to actually stick with the law instead of doing what the former president requested.

The court also turned aside any requests from Trump and his supporters to get involved in any challenges to the 2020 election results.  It has continued to rule against his claims that the presidency protected him from investigation.  They also rejected his efforts to block any release of his financial records.

This legal battle over roughly 800 pages of documents presented a unique conflict between a sitting president and his defeated rival predecessor.

But the court order has not been signed, as the court said that decision on the issue did not need to be decided now.

Many have argued that President Donald Trump's efforts amounted to “an attempted coup on Jan. 6.”

Was it? And does that matter?

Those are “unprecedented” questions that raise “serious and substantial concerns,” the court said in its one-paragraph order. But it said the ruling against Trump by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit would have been the same if he were the sitting president today.

“Because the Court of Appeals concluded that President Trump’s claims would have failed even if he were the incumbent, his status as a former President necessarily made no difference to the court’s decision,” This is according to the court’s order.

It’s interesting that one of Trump’s nominees did personally add his comments that were in support of the former president.  Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately to say that, despite the ruling against Trump’s request, a former president does not lose the ability to invoke executive privilege.  “A former President must be able to successfully invoke the Presidential communications privilege for communications that occurred during his Presidency, even if the current President does not support the privilege claim,” Kavanaugh wrote. “Concluding otherwise would eviscerate the executive privilege for Presidential communications.”

Both the court’s order and Kavanaugh noted that the appeals court had evaluated Trump’s request under the same test that came from a 1974 ruling in which the court rejected President Richard Nixon’s claims of executive privilege and ruled he had to turn over Oval Office tapes.

Lawyers for the former president had asked the justices to put on hold the D.C. Circuit decision, which rejected the former president’s assertions of executive privilege. But President Biden determined the subpoenaed material could be released to the select committee.

Trump’s lawyers argued the high court should take the case to determine whether that is proper.

“The disagreement between an incumbent president and his predecessor from a rival political party is both novel and highlights the importance of executive privilege and the ability of presidents and their advisers to reliably make and receive full and frank advice, without concern that communications will be publicly released to meet a political objective,” wrote Jesse Binnall, a lawyer for Trump.

However, every lower-court judge that has heard the issue and agreed that the committee has a right to the records,  Also that Biden, as the sitting president, was the proper person to judge whether they are protected by executive privilege.

Thompson, as the Committee Chairman, had asked the court to expedite its consideration of Trump’s request.

“The Select Committee is investigating a deadly assault on the United States Capitol, the Speaker of the House, the Vice President, and both Chambers of Congress, and a dangerous interruption of Congress’s constitutional duty and the peaceful transfer of power,” House General Counsel Douglas Letter wrote.

Biden Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the court that it should not get involved when both the president and Congress have determined the need for the information to be released.

Trump’s request “turns primarily on his claim that providing the records to the committee would harm the executive branch and, by extension, the public,” Prelogar wrote. “But the Constitution vests the Executive power in the incumbent President, who is best positioned to make those assessments. And President Biden has determined that an assertion of executive privilege over the specific records at issue here is not in the interests of the Nation.” Siding with the former president would be an unprecedented intrusion on the incumbent President’s constitutional authority,” she wrote

The House investigative committee in August had requested Trump’s official communications and the details of his activities leading up to the insurrection by the Trump supporters, an incident that forced the evacuation of the Capitol and led to the deaths of five people.

A U.S. district judge in Washington also disagreed with Trump’s claim of executive privilege in a November ruling, and the D.C. Circuit quickly affirmed the decision last month.

“The events of January 6th exposed the fragility of those democratic institutions and traditions that we had perhaps come to take for granted,” wrote Judge Patricia Millett, and joined by Judges Robert Wilkins and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “In response, the President of the United States and Congress have each made the judgment that access to this subset of presidential communication records is necessary to address a matter of great constitutional moment for the Republic.”

The January 6th panel had delayed the implementation of its order, so Trump could go to the Supreme Court.

Trump told the court that the Democrats are simply looking for information to discredit a “political foe,” not for legitimate legislative interests.

SCOTUS disagreed.

Copyright G. Ater 2022