It’s been well over a year since President Trump’s bogus voter fraud commission was disbanded. But the administration is still fighting in court efforts to get it to turn over certain internal documents from the commission to a Democratic member who sued to have access to them.
Back in December 2017, Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap (D) won a preliminary injunction order requiring the administration to provide him the requested documents. Days later, the commission was disbanded, but litigation and negotiations with the Justice Department over the document production continued.
The administration has since produced for Dunlap thousands of pages of documents, but is now continuing to resist turning over two specific categories of documents that Dunlap seeks.
The administration last week indicated that it planned to appeal a federal judge’s order that it give Dunlap certain “emails discussing potential Commission members,” as the court documents call the category materials.
The administration and Dunlap are also still arguing over whether the panel is required to turn over another category of documents: those that have to do with Vice President Mike Pence, who was named the leader of the commission, and Pence’s staff, which offered administrative support to the commission.
Dunlap’s attorneys argued in court filings last year that in withholding the documents, “the government has failed to treat Vice President Pence as a commissioner.”
“Because Vice President Pence is plainly a commissioner, there is no plausible basis for withholding such records, even on the government’s cramped view of the Court’s orders,” Dunlap’s attorneys said in the filing.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of Washington, D.C., approved a briefing schedule for the parties to lay out their arguments on how to resolve the issue.
On Monday, the judge temporarily halted her order that the administration turn over the emails about the potential commissioners.
Separate from Dunlap’s lawsuit, a Freedom of Information Act request in 2017 surfaced an email forwarded to then-Attorney General Jeff Session that bashed the idea of naming Democrats to the commission. The email’s sender, Hans von Spakovsky, was later appointed to the commission himself.
Dunlap’s attorneys will have until Friday to file court briefings on whether they would oppose such a pause while that order is appealed.
The Trump administration argued in a court filing Friday that, unlike the other internal documents turned over to Dunlap, “these discussions” were “separately designed to support the President’s power to appoint members to the Commission – a task that is solely within his province.”
“It is of no moment that others outside the White House participated in providing this advice,” the filing said. “The President may rely on anyone he chooses to advise him with respect to his exclusive appointment power with regard to the Commission.”
Read the filing below:
