Former President Donald Trump has lost his final bid to block the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th Capitol riots from having access to key documents.
In an 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court ruled that a former president could not invoke executive privilege on White House records if the current president did not also assert that privilege.
"The questions whether and in what circumstances a former president may obtain a court order preventing disclosure of privileged records from his tenure in office, in the face of a determination by the incumbent president to waive the privilege, are unprecedented and raise serious and substantial concerns," the court writes. "The Court of Appeals, however, had no occasion to decide these questions because it analyzed and rejected President Trump's privilege claims 'under any of the tests [he] advocated."
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Justice Clarence Thomas was the lone member of the court who dissented from the court's ruling, although he issued no explanation for his dissent.
With the Supreme Court's ruling, the House Select Committee will now obtain all of the documents it has requested that Trump tried to conceal.
As Politico reported last year, the documents requested by the committee include "daily presidential diaries, drafts of election-related speeches, logs of his phone calls, handwritten notes and files of top aides."
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