There are so many shoes dropping tonight that it’s hard to know which one to catch or grab on to. But here’s a decent place to start. Various White Houses have made more or less copious claims for executive privilege. But even Richard Nixon was not half this audacious. Remember those Republican National Committee emails that seem to have gone missing? President Bush’s lawyers says that if they’re ever ‘found’ then they’re covered by executive privilege too.
From the Times …
The clash also seemed to push the White House and Democrats closer to a serious confrontation over executive privilege, with the White House counsel, Fred F. Fielding, asserting that the administration has control over countless other e-mail messages that the Republican National Committee has archived. Democrats are insisting that they are entitled to get the e-mail messages directly from the national committee.
This one is worth slowing down and seeing just what the White House is saying. Executive privilege doesn’t just apply to conversations the president has with his top aides. It doesn’t just apply to conversations his top aides have with each other. It doesn’t even just apply to any presidential aides doing anything connected to the White House. Executive privilege applies to the outside political party work the president’s aides do on their own time.
Remember, members of the White House staff have outside party-funded email accounts for doing political work they are not permitted to do on taxpayers’ time. They do their official work with government phones, emails, blackberries, etc. But if they break the rules and do official work using outside party-funded email addresses then executive privilege covers that too.
