Former President Donald Trump filed a motion Thursday seeking to temporarily pause the release of documents related to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Hundreds of internal White House documents related to the planning of and response to the riot at the Capitol are expected to be released to a House select committee on Friday. On Wednesday, a federal judge denied Trump’s appeal to block the release of those documents.
In a new court filing, Trump has asked the D.C. Court of Appeals for “a brief pause in the production” of those documents. The filing argues that the former president “will suffer irreparable injury” if the documents are released.
The appeals court has temporarily blocked the National Archive from releasing the documents while it considers Trump’s latest motion.
Trump previously sued the House committee seeking the documents related to the attack, which left five dead and more than 140 officers injured, by citing executive privilege. Judge Tanya Chutkan denied Trump’s appeal on Wednesday.
“This court will not effectively ignore its own reasoning in denying injunctive relief in the first place to grant injunctive relief now,” Chutkan wrote in her decision.
Trump also cited executive privilege in a separate lawsuit against the committee and the National Archives last month, as he attempted to halt the transfer of his records.
President Joe Biden previously declined to assert executive privilege on most of Trump’s records, determining that doing so was “not in the best interests of the United States.”
To further explain Biden’s decision not to help Trump keep his records secret, White House counsel Dana Remus wrote that the documents could “shed light on events within the White House on and about January 6 and bear on the Select Committee’s need to understand the facts underlying the most serious attack on the operations of the Federal Government since the Civil War.”