The supreme court has formally rejected Donald Trump’s request to block the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack from accessing White House records related to the events of 6 January 2021.
The court announced on Tuesday in its latest list of orders that it would not take up Trump’s appeal to a lower-court ruling allowing the select committee access to the documents.
The news comes a month after the supreme court rejected Trump’s emergency motion to block the release of the documents as his case regarding executive privilege claims made its way through the courts.
That January ruling cleared the way for the select committee to start receiving Trump White House documents. They have already started combing through the records.
Seven people died as a result of the attack on the US Capitol by supporters Trump told to “fight like hell” in service of his lie that his defeat by Joe Biden was the result of electoral fraud.
The attack did not prevent certification of electoral college results, though 147 Republicans in the House and Senate did lodge objections.
More than 100 police officers were injured. More than 700 people have been charged. Eleven people, members of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, face charges of seditious conspiracy.
Trump was impeached for inciting an insurrection, but acquitted when enough Republican senators stayed loyal.
Only two Republicans, Trump critics Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, sit on the House select committee investigating January 6 and Trump’s attempts to overturn the election.
The committee is working quickly, given Republicans’ expected takeover of the House after midterm elections in November.
Public hearings are believed to be on the way and key aides to Trump have been served with subpoenas or asked to co-operate. Few have. Steve Bannon, a former White House strategist and key figure on the pro-Trump far right, has pleaded not guilty to contempt of Congress – a criminal charge carrying jail time.
Others including the former chief of staff Mark Meadows have refused to co-operate. Members of the panel have said they expect Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer and a key figure in attempts to overturn the election, to testify.
The supreme court’s formal rejection of Trump’s attempt to keep White House records away from the committee was not a surprise.
Laurence Tribe, a Harvard law professor, said on Twitter: “Trump’s baseless and brazen attempt to keep the January 6 select committee from obtaining his White House records has now been turned down by the supreme court of the United States. No surprise there, but with this court one never knows until one knows …”
The court is currently imbalanced 6-3 in favor of conservatives, after Trump appointed three justices in his single four-year term in office.
Clarence Thomas, who was appointed by George HW Bush, was the only justice who said he would have granted Trump’s attempt to stop the January 6 committee gaining access to his records.
Thomas and his wife were the subject of an extensive New York Times profile published on Tuesday. Ginni Thomas is a conservative activist with close connections to pro-Trump groups.
Dustin Stockton, a conservative organizer with ties to Bannon, told the paper that Ginni Thomas was tasked with coordinating rightwing groups around Trump’s rally near the White House before the Capitol attack, so “there wouldn’t be any division”.
“The way it was presented to me was that Ginni was uniting these different factions around a singular mission on 6 January” Stockton told the paper. “That Ginni was involved made sense – she’s pretty neutral and she doesn’t have a lot of enemies in the movement.”
Questions about Clarence Thomas’s role on the court given his wife’s work have mounted since the New Yorker published a lengthy piece of its own last month. Neither the justice nor Ginni Thomas has commented.
