White House press secretary Jen Psaki Friday afternoon casually let reporters know President Joe Biden will not invoke executive privilege on behalf of former president Donald Trump when the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack requests documents.
Trump is claiming that his status as a former president allows him to retain executive privilege rights, which is wrong. The ability to invoke executive privilege rests only with the current president, and is well-defined.
“The president has already concluded it would not be appropriate to exert executive privilege,” Psaki told Huffpost White House correspondent S.V. Dáte when asked.
(Dáte is the reporter who possibly is best-known for asking then-President Donald Trump last year in August, live and on-camera, “do you regret at all, all the lying that you’ve done to the American people?“)
Top national security expert and attorney Bradley Moss quickly weighed in, saying “this would pretty much be the ball game on that issue,” meaning there’s nearly no chance Trump will get that protection, barring “intervention” from the Library of Congress’s Archivist.