Biden and Trump
Biden and TrumpReuters

US President Joe Biden has blocked a second attempt by former President Donald Trump to withhold documents sought by lawmakers investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and ordered the latest batch to be handed over to Congress, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

“Biden has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the best interests of the United States, and therefore is not justified,” Biden’s counsel Dana Remus wrote in an October 25 letter to the National Archives and Records Administration, according to the report.

Taylor Budowich, a spokesman for Trump, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Biden earlier this month blocked Trump’s first bid to withhold an initial tranche of documents related to the Capitol riots.

In response, Trump filed a lawsuit seeking to block White House records from his tenure there being obtained by the congressional committee. The lawsuit accuses the select committee and its chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, of harassing Trump and senior members of his administration with “an illegal, unfounded, and overbroad records request to the Archivist of the United States.”

In both cases, the White House told the federal archivist that Congress must “understand the circumstances that led to ... the most serious attack on the operations of the federal government since the Civil War.”

In May, the US House of Representatives passed a bill to form a commission to probe the January 6 attack on the Capitol. The bill was approved in a 252-175 vote, with 35 Republicans joining all Democrats in support.

Two days later, however, Senate Republicans blocked the legislation. Senators voted 54-35 on the House-passed bill, falling short of the 10 GOP votes needed to get it over an initial hurdle.

Without any pathway forward in the Senate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she would use her power to pursue a select committee in the House that will be controlled by Democrats.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy then protested Pelosi's refusal to seat two of the Republicans he named to the panel — Reps. Jim Banks and Jim Jordan.

The House of Representatives then voted 218-197 against McCarthy’s effort to seat his preferred members for the select committee.