Shortly after the Supreme Court rejected former President Donald Trump’s bid to block the release of his White House documents to the House Jan. 6 select committee on Wednesday night, the committee said it “has already begun to receive records that the former president had hoped to keep hidden.” The Supreme Court’s decision “is a victory for the rule of law and American democracy,” the Jan. 6 committee said. 

The Supreme Court’s decision Wednesday “may be the most significant moment yet for the Jan. 6 select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol,” Politico reports. “It will help the panel connect dots between Trump’s efforts to stoke disinformation about the 2020 election results and his awareness of the threat of violence posed by the groups that heeded his call to descend on Washington. They’ll also reveal details about what actions he took as the mob of his supporters surrounded and breached the Capitol, overrunning law enforcement and sending Congress fleeing for safety.”

The unsigned Supreme Court decision held that Trump’s claim of executive privilege, despite President Biden’s waiver of that claim, does raise “serious and substantial concerns,” but they need not be addressed in this case because the federal appellate court had determined Trump would lose his appeal “even if he were the incumbent.” Trump’s lawyers had argued the case was important for all future former presidents and their “clear right to protect their confidential records from premature dissemination.”

“I’m not sure it’s possible to overstate how thorough and brutal a defeat this short-lived litigation was for Trump and his allies,” conservative lawyer and prominent Trump critic George Conway tweeted. 

“Trump’s theme here was to point to the specter of a future president vindictively releasing privileged materials of a former president and thereby doing great harm to the nation and to the presidency,” Conway summarized. And the Supreme Court appeared to agree, because it “went out of its way to leave open the possibility that a former president could successfully invoke a privilege over a current president’s determination. Put simply, Trump’s own argument, by highlighting the danger of a future Trump, made the result even worse for Trump.”