Obama’s Claim of Executive Privilege: It’s Frivolous

Via Western Rifle Shooters Association

Today Deputy Attorney General James Cole advised Darrell Issa, Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, that the Department of Justice will not respond to the committee’s subpoena of certain documents relating to the Fast and Furious scandal. Instead, the Obama administration is asserting a claim of executive privilege for the reasons laid out in Eric Holder’s letter to President Obama dated June 19.

r is a remarkable document. Viewed from a strictly technical standpoint, it is a terrible piece of legal work. Its arguments are weak at best; in some cases, they are so frivolous as to invite the imposition of sanctions if they were asserted in court. I will explain why momentarily, but first this observation: if an opposing party requests documents that plainly are protected by a privilege, a lawyer will routinely assert the privilege, on principle, even though there is nothing hurtful to his case in those documents. On the other hand, a lawyer will not assert a lousy claim of privilege unless he badly wants to keep the documents in question out of the opponent’s hands because of their damaging nature. If I am correct that the administration’s assertion of executive privilege is baseless, it is reasonable to infer that the documents, if made public, would be highly damaging to President Obama, Attorney General Holder, or other senior administration officials. Now, as to Holder’s letter:

First: in the first paragraph of his letter to the president, Holder describes Fast and Furious as a program that was intended “to stem the illegal flow of firearms from the United States to drug cartels in Mexico.” This rank dishonesty suggests that Holder’s letter has primarily a political intent. In fact, the purpose of the Fast and Furious program was to facilitate and even finance the flow of weapons to the Mexican cartels. Why the administration wanted to do this remains a mystery; a mystery that might be cleared up if the subpoenaed documents are produced.

Second: the House committee has narrowed its subpoena to an extraordinary degree.

More @ Powerline