After reading tonight's order from the Supreme Court and rereading Judge Millett's opinion for the D.C. Circuit, 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.
To put a fine point on it, the way that the Supreme Court cut back on the Court of Appeals' opinion—by saying it didn't matter that Trump is a former president—places even greater weight on the Court of Appeals' evisceration of the substance of Trump's claims of privilege and ...
... on the vital importance of the legislative purposes being served by the Jan. 6 select committee's investigation.
And there's an incredible irony in the subtext here. 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.
In other words, putting it in my preferred lingo, what if you had a future guy who's as bad as the former guy??!!
And the Supreme Court was clearly worried about this, too—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.
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