berg80
Diamond Member
- Oct 28, 2017
- 16,030
- 13,477
- 2,320
The ruling thus seems to reserve for another day the question of whether a former president can assert the privilege—and Justice Kavanaugh actually wrote a short opinion explaining why he disagrees with the D.C. Circuit on the point.Executive Privilege...and the protections of the 4th Amendment from illegal searches from political opponents.
But the justices also seized on the D.C. Circuit’s alternative basis for resolving the case—which is actually far broader than the mere proposition that a former president can’t assert the privilege in the face of the current president’s objections. Eight justices of the Supreme Court, declined publicly to note that they would disturb the D.C. Circuit’s finding that Trump’s executive privilege claim would fail even if he were the incumbent president. In the past, the court observes, Presidents have “waived privilege in times of pressing national need.” The D.C. Circuit ruled, and the Supreme Court left undisturbed, that the Jan. 6 insurrection was a “clear and apparent effort to subvert the Constitution.” In such an “extraordinary” situation, any President’s claim of executive privilege will fail to stand up to Congress’s need for investigation and, in turn, disclosure of the former president's communications.
Extrapolating from this, the DoJ's interest, representing the people's interest, in pursuing criminal charges supersedes any claim of EP.