WASHINGTON Former President Donald Trump s efforts to remain in power by effectively overthrowing the Constitution should remain a secret under that same documents concept of executive privilege, his lawyers are telling a federal appellate court a week after the identical argument was rejected by a trial court judge.

Lawyers Jesse Binnall and Justin Clark warn that if the judges allow the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to have access to Trumps documents, future presidents will suffer, too.

It is nave to assume that the fallout will be limited to President Trump or the events of January 6, 2021. Every Congress will point to some unprecedented thing about this president to justify a request for his presidential records, they wrote in a filing this week to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In these hyper-partisan times, Congress will increasingly and inevitably use this new weapon to perpetually harass its political rival.

The Biden White House, the House committee and U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan all have accepted as a basic premise that the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol was an extraordinary event that calls for extraordinary measures.

The documents shed light on events within the White House on and about Jan. 6 and bear on the select committees need to understand the facts underlying the most serious attack on the operations of the federal government since the Civil War, White House counsel Dana Remus wrote in an Oct. 8 letter to the National Archives, approving release of the first batch of documents.

Chutkan, in her Nov. 9 decision denying Trump an injunction to block release of those papers, wrote: The court holds that the public interest lies in permitting not enjoining the combined will of the legislative and executive branches to study the events that led to and occurred on January 6, and to consider legislation to prevent such events from ever occurring again.

Trump and his lawyers, though, appear to deny that Jan. 6 was anything special and essentially argue that the then-presidents role in inciting what happened that day should be treated as normal White House deliberation and decision-making and, therefore, protected by executive privilege the notion that a president should be able to receive candid guidance from advisers without fear of public disclosure.

Democrats in Congress created the United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol to effectively intimidate and harass President Trump and his closest advisors under the guise of investigating the events of January 6, 2021, Binnall and Clark wrote.

Trump, however, had already been impeached for inciting the attack in the final days of his term. And in recent months, more information has emerged that details how he and his advisers discussed using the military to seize voting machines and to force states to rerun elections before eventually settling on a plan to coerce Vice President Mike Pence into unilaterally rejecting the Electoral College count and declaring Trump the winner.

Michael Luttig, a retired federal appellate judge and a longtime favorite in conservative circles, said Trumps efforts to keep deliberations about such activity a secret may well be rejected out of hand. The Supreme Court likely would never uphold an assertion of executive privilege that would shield illegality, he said.

Laurence Tribe , a constitutional law professor at Harvard, said deliberation about overturning an election would fall outside of the structure and responsibilities of the presidency parameters set by the U.S. Supreme Court when it decided against letting President Richard Nixon keep his tape-recorded conversations about the Watergate burglary and cover-up a secret.