The case is before the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, after a federal judge earlier this month declined to halt the release of the Trump documents from the National Archives. President Joe Biden is declining to assert executive privilege on the documents, so Trump is asking the court to consider his assertion of privilege instead.
The case touches on some unsettled law around whether a former president can litigate executive privilege claims when the incumbent sides with transparency. And the three judges on the appellate panel — all Democratic appointees — signaled that they found some of the case’s questions difficult, even as they expressed doubt about Trump’s claims.
It’s nearly guaranteed that, however they rule, the case will end up appealed to the Supreme Court.
Contents
Judges ask why a former president should get to overrule the current one
The appeals court showed little sympathy for Trump’s arguments for blocking the documents’ release.
“Why should the former president be the one to make that determination when you’re talking about accommodating another branch of government?” Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said while the Trump team was arguing its case.
“It would seem that the current president has not only the confidentiality factor that he’s thinking about, but the current duty to the interests of the United States even broader than those that the former president would be concerned about,” she added.
Judge Patricia Millett grilled Trump lawyer Justin Clark on what else the court is supposed to weigh in considering these kinds of disputes.
“You’re going to have to come up with something with more power to outweigh the incumbent president’s decision to waive,” Millett said. “You’re going to have to change the score on that scoreboard,” which, the judge said, would already be stacked with points in the president’s favor according to Supreme Court precedent.
The court appeared very uninterested in reviewing the White House records document by document.
In…
Source : cnn
