Jan. 6 House Panel Reportedly Finding Trump White House Visitor Logs 'Very Fruitful'

Mary Papenfuss
Updated ·2 min read
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The chair of the House select committee investigating last year’s riot at the U.S. Capitol is already finding newly released visitor logs from Donald Trump’s White House “very fruitful,” according to a CNN reporter.

The National Archives and Records Administration turned over the logs, which Trump had battled to keep secret, on Thursday after it was ordered to do so by President Joe Biden.

NARA also turned over records from former Vice President Mike Pence, meeting a March 3 deadline.

Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chair of the select committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021, told CNN reporter Annie Grayer that he was already finding both sets of records “very fruitful,” though he provided no other details.

The committee had fought to obtain the visitor logs in an effort to track people who may have discussed the attack on Congress with Trump in the Oval Office.

The former president had tried to block the release of the visitor logs, claiming they were shielded by executive privilege. But Biden rejected his claim “in light of the urgency” of the committee’s work and the “compelling need” for Congress to determine exactly what fueled the storming of the Capitol on the day Congress met to certify the Electoral College count from the 2020 election.

“The president has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interest of the United States, and therefore is not justified, as to these records and portions of records,” White House counsel Dana Remus wrote in a letter last month to National Archivist David Ferriero.

Remus noted that the Biden administration, as a matter of transparency, has released its logs monthly, as have other administrations.

Several other documents turned over in January to the committee from the Trump White House had arrived at the National Archives ripped to pieces. NARA taped them back together. A statement from the National Archives noted that they had been “torn up by former President Trump.”

This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.

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