The Biden administration has said it will not withhold records pertaining to the days leading to the Capitol riot, however certain cases may need to be evaluated.
“I would say that we take this matter incredibly seriously,” Jen Psaki said. “The president already concluded that it would not be appropriate to assert executive privilege. And so, we will respond promptly to these questions as they arise. And certainly as they come up from Congress, and certainly we have been working closely with Congressional committees and others as they work to get to the bottom of what happened on January 06.”
Any questions of executive privilege would be reviewed as necessary. Four former members of Trump’s administration have already been subpoenaed. Those members include former White House advisor, Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Defense Department official, Kash Patel, and former Deputy Chief of staff Dan Scavino. Bannon was fired in 2017, but the two have remained friends.
Bannon had recently admitted on his podcast that he told the former president to “kill this administration in the crib early on by it’s own incompetence and it’s illegitimacy.”
“We said and told president Trump, ‘you need to kill this administration in the crib early on by it’s own incompetence and illegitimacy,” Bannon said on his podcast. “It’s killed itself. Just let this go with what this illegitimate regime is doing. It killed itself. We told you from the beginning. Just expose it. Just expose it. Never back down. Never give up. This thing will implode.”
There was an implosion, but it was not within the Biden administration. The implosion came from within the Trump administration, due to an incompetent president who was unable and or unwilling to pull his own head from his rear end long enough to do anything.
“He’s also someone who we realize was talking to president Trump in the final days,” Robert Costa told MSNBC News of Bannon. “Talking to Trump even on January 05, the evening of the insurrection and telling Trump, based on our reporting, to ‘kill the Biden presidency in the crib.”
White House spokesman, Michael Gwin, told CNN, “As president Biden has said, the events of January 06 were a dark stain on our country’s history and they represented an attack on the foundations of our constitution and democracy in a way that few other events have. The president is deeply committed to ensuring that something like this does not happen again, and he supports a thorough investigation into what occured. That’s why his administration has been engaging with Congress on matters relating to January 06 for several months now and will continue to do so with the Select Committee.”
In August, Trump said he would invoke executive privilege if necessary to stall the investigation, but it seems unlikely anything will come of it.
Sources: Politico, CNN, Reuters, The Hill.
