We’re covering this in other pieces today. But I want to zoom in on the issue of executive privilege, which Trump’s lawyers have repeatedly invoked in their latest court action. The filing has been mocked, rightly, for various reasons. But I want to zoom in specifically on this issue. Trump claims that many of the documents seized from his estate must be returned to him because they are covered by executive privilege.

This is not how executive privilege works or what it is. Let’s discuss.

Rich Lowry, Editor of The National Review, has a guest opinion piece in the Times today, the gist of which is that Republicans are right to be “paranoid” about the search of the President’s Florida estate. We hear about Democratic criticisms of the Whitewater investigation, James Comey’s mishandling of the Hillary’s emails affair, etc. etc. All par for the course. But what I wanted to note is the central role of the Russia probe. It now serves as the baseless investigation, the hoax, the prosecutorial abuse that justifies everything from the Trumpian right that comes later.

This is no surprise from Trump himself: If Trump doesn’t like something, it’s a hoax. But here we see Trump’s relative success defining it as such not only for almost everyone on the right side of the political spectrum but in much of the journalistic world and even among many Democrats.

TPM Reader BB has his own take on JD Vance’s struggles in Ohio …

I am not the long-time resident of Ohio that RJ is, but I live outside of Cincinnati, and one thing that has been striking to me (and might explain the Senate Leadership Fund ad buy) is the degree to which Vance just disappeared from the airwaves after the primary. I have seen constant ads from Tim Ryan, both talking about himself (working class Ohioan, agreed with Trump on trade, not about parties… basically what you would expect from a smart Democrat trying to win in Ohio) and bashing on Vance (elite snobbish fake from San Francisco, does not care about Ohioans just his political career, etc.). Only within the last couple of weeks have I seen a single TV ad from Vance, basically his wife talking about what a nice guy he is and how she hopes Ohio will give him a chance, which is invariably followed by several Ryan ads with cops and military vets talking about how much Vance sucks. It has just been a remarkably one-sided affair. I assume that at least part of the problem is a lack of money on Vance’s part, though it is odd that I have not seen ads from outside groups, either. Maybe overconfidence on their part?

TPM Reader RJ gives us some background to understand how the Ohio Senate race is unfolding. I don’t know if RJ was prompted by this news. But Republicans now seem to believe – rightly, I think – that they run a very real chance of losing that seat and have ordered in what amounts to TV carpet bombing of the race.

The Times has a story disclosing the fact that investigators have interviewed both Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and his Deputy Patrick Philbin in their classified documents inquiry. That’s not surprising. The two were also originally tasked with liaising with the National Archives on Trump’s behalf. But it does clarify one thing. If Trump had really had the “standing order” about documents he took home automatically becoming declassified, such an order would certainly have gone through the Counsel’s office. Obviously that never happened and we can infer that investigators know that as a fact directly from these two men.

The articles that make you feel the best are the ones to be most skeptical of. But with that said, this article in The Guardian certainly brought a smile to my face and satisfied a need for a schadenfreude fix. A federal judge will now decide whether to release some portions of the affidavit in support of the search of Mar-a-Lago. There’s the warrant and the inventory, both of which the target gets to see. It’s the affidavit that lays out why are we doing this; why is it important; what larger schemes are we investigating that requires us to go into this home and look for stuff.

Fascinating report here from the Times’ Shane Goldmacher. The national GOP — meaning the top DC party committees and leadership PACs — appears to be significantly ramping back support for Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Blake Masters in Arizona and even Ron Johnson in Wisconsin. Here’s the Times story and here’s Goldmacher’s Twitter thread, which I at least found easier to follow.

These stories are always a bit hard to interpret and everyone wants to jump forward with tendentious interpretations. Basically the top Senate party committee canceled a bunch of ad buy reservations in these states. Some of it is an effort to redeploy spending to less regulated parts of the campaign finance ecosystem, away from joint campaigns and hybrid spends. Some of these spending channels require the campaign to put up a minimum percentage of the spend in hard money. But the campaigns themselves are struggling financially. So they can’t afford their part.

Jack Goldsmith has a lengthy discussion at the Lawfare Blog of whether Attorney General Garland was right to seek a search warrant to search and seize records from ex-President Trump’s Florida estate. It is a good discussion, though one might say the very brazenness of Trump’s indifference to the law has a way of rendering precious or quaint any serious and deliberate discussion of potential consequences. Most of Goldsmith’s discussion can be boiled down to this: it all depends on what’s in the documents, just how secret they needed to be and what Trump was planning to do with them. And it’s hard to disagree with that — of course it does. But Goldsmith’s analysis is missing something.