“This is Trump 101, in terms of delaying and grinding out legal actions that affect him,” said Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime lawyer and “fixer” who served time in federal prison for helping Trump make preelection hush-money payments in 2016 to women who said they’d had affairs with Trump.

Trump sued the National Archives and the House’s Jan. 6 select committee earlier this week, claiming that documents from his administration related to the insurrection are protected by “executive privilege.” His onetime White House aide, Stephen Bannon, meanwhile, is defying a committee subpoena to provide documents and testimony.

“He’s playing for delay,” said Norm Eisen, the top ethics lawyer in Democrat Barack Obama’s White House who later worked on Trump’s first impeachment, who added that neither Trump’s nor Bannon’s legal case is particularly sound.

“Inciting an insurrection is not an executive function, so executive privilege does not apply,” he said. “Bannon’s position is like a bachelor’s degree in stupid, while the Trump position is like a Ph.D. in stupid.”