House Jan. 6 select committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and vice chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) hit back at ex-President Donald Trump on Monday evening after he filed a lawsuit attempting to block the committee from obtaining documents from the National Archives.
Thompson and Cheney slammed Trump’s suit, which cited “executive privilege” as the basis for blocking the committee’s subpoena to the National Archives, as “nothing more than an attempt to delay and obstruct our probe” in a joint statement.
“Precedent and law are on our side,” they said. “Executive privilege is not absolute and President [Joe] Biden has so far declined to invoke that privilege.”
Thompson and Cheney asserted that the panel’s authority to get the records, which focus on Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election while in office, “is clear.”
“We’ll fight the former President’s attempt to obstruct our investigation while we continue to push ahead successfully with our probe on a number of other fronts,” the lawmakers said.
Earlier on Monday, Trump sued both the committee and the National Archives in D.C. federal court to block the transfer of the documents after Biden declined to invoke executive privilege under the Presidential Records Act.
The ex-president’s legal team requested that the judge either toss out the subpoena or declare the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional.
The attorneys argued that allowing the committee to obtain the records “would destroy the very fabric of our constitutional separation of powers.”
