Leftover executive privilege
The Daily Beast on the “privilege” issue:
[Cannon’s] ruling was widely criticized by former prosecutors and legal scholars on Monday over the way it awkwardly lent credence to the idea that an ex-president can somehow assert “executive privilege” over government documents, even if federal law enforcement agencies operating with the tacit approval of a current president are acting in their capacity as the current executive branch.
Similar to the question I kept squawking yesterday – how does he get to claim “executive privilege” when he’s not the executive any more? What executive privilege? The whole point of it is to enable the actual executive to do the job. When the job is not yours any more you don’t need the privilege and you don’t get to hang onto it. Trump seems to think it’s an honorific, like a knighthood. Why aren’t people just slapping him and telling him to snap out of it, like Cher in that movie?
Cannon’s order was chock-full of innuendo, including odd swipes at the Biden administration and jabs at investigative journalists for their role in uncovering what exactly Trump did with these classified records at Mar-a-Lago.
Any gossip? Diary entries? Shopping lists?
She went even further, noting the importance of having an independent referee oversee the handling of seized materials to ensure that Trump wouldn’t suffer “irreparable injury” from “exposure to either the Investigative Team or the media.”
But Trump should suffer irreparable injury. Lots of it, starting right now.
According to a transcript, the Justice Department’s top counterintelligence prosecutor, Jay I. Bratt, later summed up why it’s bonkers to have a former president assert executive privilege against a current president to slow down the FBI—and put some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets right back into the hands of a former president who no longer has
noany authority to have them.“We have no idea where they would be stored; and again, this would be giving access to people [to] things that they do not have the right to have access,” Bratt said, criticizing what he called “a fanciful view that somehow they would… prohibit the Executive Branch from reviewing the Executive Branch materials for a core Executive Branch function.”
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This isn’t the first time Trump has waved around his expired credentials and claimed what some have called “leftover executive privilege.” When he tried to stop the Jan. 6 Committee from obtaining his administration’s records at the National Archives, the argument was shot down by a federal judge who proclaimed that “presidents are not kings, and plaintiff is not president.”
What I’m saying. He has it confused with royalty or a dukedom.
It’s time for the Trump supporters to find a new demigod to worship, this one is stinking up the place. His credentials and executive privilege aren’t the only things past their expiration dates.
If, in fact, he thought that the election was stolen from him by all the people he sued without evidence, perhaps he thinks he has a case that he has executive privilege, and that as soon as Wisconsin and Maricopa county election audits were done and the electors decertified in favor of HIS electors he’d be moving back into the house he so affactionatey called a dump, he would just bring those documens back into the White House. Where they belong.
With him.
“Affectionately” cannot describe an emotion or concept that registers on the sensors of a narcissistic megalomaniac like DJT. He has no “affection” for anyone or anything.