Donald Trump, the former US president, has been scrambling this week to make a last-ditch legal bid to block the release of sensitive White House records related to the deadly 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol – and scored a victory on Thursday when a federal appeals court allowed a temporary stay on the process. The National Archives, a federal agency that holds presidential files, was poised to begin givingcongressional investigators hundreds of pages of documents and other material, such as video clips, that Trump wants to keep secret, on Friday. But on Thursday afternoon the federal appeals court in Washington DC granted Trump’s request to temporarily block the archives from releasing records to the bipartisan House select committee analysing the Capitol insurrection and the conduct of Trump and senior aides in his administration in relation to it. He had asked the appeals court on Thursday morning for a temporary injunction that followed US district judge Tanya Chutkan’s ruling earlier that Trump could not claim executive privilege over the White House documents subpoenaed by committee. As is customary, the DC circuit court randomly assigns three judges to a panel to consider the appeal. It was announced that the three judges who will hear Trump’s appeal following the granting of the temporary stay will be Patricia Millett, Robert Wilkins and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The court has set a hearing for 30 November to hear oral arguments in the case, granting a request for an expedited schedule. If the appellate court had declined to issue a preliminary injunction, Trump had been expected to appeal to the supreme court through its “shadow docket”, which allows justices to quickly decide emergency matters without full briefs and arguments. It is not the first time in a long business and political career that he has used delaying tactics in the legal process to his own advantage. The Democratic-led bipartisan committee faces a potential deadline of winding up its investigation before next November’s midterm elections in which Republicans are tipped to win back control of the House of Representatives. Trump has argued that the materials requested by the committee were covered by a legal doctrine known as executive privilege that protects the confidentiality of some White House communications. He called the House committee’s request a “vexatious, illegal fishing expedition” that was “untethered from any legitimate legislative purpose”. But Chutkan, in her Tuesday ruling, rejected that argument, in a clear win for congressional oversight powers. “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President,” she said of Trump. The House select committee has said it needs the requested materials to understand the role Trump may have played in fomenting the riot in which his supporters aimed to block members of Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s presidential win, despite the 2020 contest being widely declared the most secure election in US history. According to an earlier court filing from the archives, the records include call logs, drafts of remarks and speeches and handwritten notes from Trump’s then chief of staff, Mark Meadows. There are also copies of talking points from the then press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, and “a draft Executive Order on the topic of election integrity”, the National Archives has said. Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat who leads the House committee, said in a statement after Tuesday’s ruling that the records were crucial for understanding the attack and “in my view, there couldn’t be a more compelling public interest than getting answers about an attack on our democracy”. The committee has already interviewed more than 150 witnesses and issued more than 30 subpoenas, including on Tuesday to McEnany and the former White House senior adviser Stephen Miller. Four people died during the 6 January attack on the Capitol by extremist Trump supporters – one shot dead by police and the other three of natural causes, including one trampled by the mob – and more than a hundred police officers were injured. A Capitol Police officer who had been attacked by protesters died the next day and four other police officers who defended the Capitol later died by suicide. About 700 people have been arrested for their involvement in the attack and many of the cases are still working their way through the courts. Carl Tobias, Williams chair in law at the University of Richmond, Virginia, said: “Trump’s entire effort appears to be right out of his playbook. Trump obstructs and delays in apparent attempts to prevent the Congress and the courts from discharging their constitutional duties.” He added: “In this, as in so many other prior gambits, Trump apparently wants to run out the clock in the hopes that the 2022 elections will yield GOP House and Senate majorities that will halt congressional investigation of his role in the January 6 insurrection.” After leaving office, Trump was impeached for a historic second time, charged with inciting the insurrection. He was acquitted by the US Senate but seven Republican senators were among the majority who voted to convict but fell short of the two-thirds required.