WASHINGTON DC (Agencies): :The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is seeking a trove of documents from the prior Trump administration, giving the White House record keepers and other agencies two weeks to turn them over.
The first wave of document requests were deliver-ed not only to the National Archives — where White House records are retained — but also the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and others.
“The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is examining the facts, circumstances, and causes of the January 6th attack. Our Constitution provides for a peaceful transfer of power, and this investigation seeks to evaluate threats to that process, identify lessons learned and recommend laws, policies, procedures, rules, or regulations necessary to protect our republic in the future,” Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) wrote in the letter sent to the agencies.
According to the committee, the requests to the National Archives “demands a wide range of White House records of the previous administration.”
The letters were delivered as Thompson said earlier this week that the panel would ask communications companies to turn over rec-ords for hundreds of people, including lawmakers.
“We have quite an exhaustive list of people. I won’t tell you who they are, but it’s several hundred people that make up the list of people we are planning to contact,” he said Monday.
Wednesday’s letters fall short of the committee’s suggestion that it may move straight to subpoenas in order to gain access to records.
“We have already had discussions about the need to subpoena documents and the sense of urgency we have. Normally we would request voluntary compliance. We may move quickly to subpoenas when it comes to documents so that we ensure that they’re preserved and that there’s no delay,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told reporters in late July.
The request to the National Archives comes after the Biden White House previously rebuffed a coalition of House committees that asked for officials to turn over records from the previous administration.
“A lot of those documents would be in the Nat-ional Archives, I believe, so I’m not sure it would be White House documents,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in March.
