- The White House on Wednesday invoked executive privilege to block the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's unredacted Russia report as a U.S. House panel met to vote on holding the U.S. attorney general in contempt of Congress for withholding the document.
Here is how executive privilege works and how useful it might be to Trump as the investigations close in on him.Executive privilege is a legal principle that allows the president to refuse to comply with demands for information like congressional subpoenas. But the Supreme Court has said that it is “fundamental to the operation of government and inextricably rooted in the separation of powers under the Constitution.”
U.S. v. Nixon is also widely understood to mean that executive privilege cannot be used to cover up wrongdoing. That view was endorsed by current U.S. Attorney General William Barr during his Senate confirmation hearing. Presidents George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all invoked executive privilege in response to congressional investigations. But compared with previous presidents, recent ones have hesitated to claim executive privilege, in part because of how Nixon used it, said Mitchel Sollenberger, a politics professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
In a letter to Trump on Wednesday, Attorney General William Barr encouraged the president to make a"preliminary, protective assertion of executive privilege designed to ensure your ability to make a final assertion, if necessary, over some or all of the subpoenaed materials."
.If Yahoo doesnt know the answer to that it shouldn't be reporting the news! .When MSM reports news in 'He said, She said' fashion- 'Democrats SAID...', instead of reporting investigative TRUTH, they're tRump Puppets/Putin protectors! Lawrence maddow chrislhayes JoyAnnReid
Impeach Trump now. Enough is enough