Report: Donald Trump Should Start Panicking

During the four years that Donald Trump was in office, he and his lawyers made a regular habit of hiding behind the office of the presidency when it came to any investigations of wrongdoing on his part. Sued for defamation by writer E. Jean Carroll, whose rape accusations he claimed were a lie while simultaneously insulting her looks? According to then attorney general William Barr, Trump was acting in his official capacity as POTUS, and therefore should be defended by the Justice Department. Attempted to extort another country into digging up dirt on his political rival? He was just doing what presidents do. Suspected of committing fraud relating to hush-money payments to a porn star? In that instance, his personal attorneys boldly argued that it was unconstitutional for presidents to be investigated for any crimes whatsoever while in office, up to and including shooting a person on Fifth Avenue.

Now, obviously, Trump is no longer president, despite what he and his most insane supporters may believe. And that means he can blather on about executive privilege all he wants, and has in his attempt to stonewall the January 6 committee, but it holds about as much weight as a five-year-old or an inmate at the asylum he should’ve been checked into a long time ago saying it. That’s a position a lot of legal scholars have maintained since Team Trump began insisting Congress has no business gaining access to information detailing exactly what the ex-president was up to before, after, and during the attack on the Capitol, and on Tuesday night, a judge put it in official, devastating writing.

Per The Washington Post:

A federal judge in Washington ruled late Tuesday that hundreds of pages of Trump White House records can be turned over to a congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol despite the former president’s objections. The decision by U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan clears the way for the release of government records requested by Congress beginning Friday. Attorneys for former president Donald Trump immediately appealed and moved to bar release of the documents by the National Archives pending a ruling by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The House panel and the Justice Department “contend that discovering and coming to terms with the causes underlying the January 6 attack is a matter of unsurpassed public importance because such information relates to our core democratic institutions and the public’s confidence in them,” Chutkan wrote in a 39-page opinion. “The court agrees.”

In his lawsuit against the chairman of the House select committee and the head of the National Archives, Trump and his lawyers wrote that presidents require “full and frank” advice to carry out their duties, and that breaking the confidentiality of such conversations would set a dangerous precedent. Of course, in his case, many of the conversations he was having at the end of…