Wikipedia: What is Executive Privilege????

[Patricia M. McBride]

I thought since executive privilege has been used in Fast and Furious, it might be interesting to find out exactly what executive privilege is and  actually covers, so I went looking and found the following.  I also thought it of great interest what the supreme court said when Nixon tried to invoke executive privilege (and can clearly see the relationship between this and the Nixon mess which ended in President Nixon resigning from the office of the president................). 

 

In the United States government, executive privilege is the power claimed by the President of the United States and other members of the executive branch to resist certain subpoenas and other interventions by the legislative and judicial branches of government. The concept of executive privilege is not mentioned explicitly in the United States Constitution, but the Supreme Court of the United States ruled it to be an element of the separation of powers doctrine, and/or derived from the supremacy of executive branch in its own area of Constitutional activity.^[1]

The Supreme Court confirmed the legitimacy of this doctrine in United States v. Nixon, but only to the extent of confirming that there is a qualified privilege. Once invoked, a presumption of privilege is established, requiring the Prosecutor to make a "sufficient showing" that the "Presidential material" is "essential to the justice of the case."(418 U.S. at 713-14). Chief Justice Burger further stated that executive privilege would most effectively apply when the oversight of the executive would impair that branch's national security concerns.

Historically, the uses of executive privilege underscore the untested nature of the doctrine, since Presidents have generally sidestepped open confrontations with the United States Congress and the courts over the issue by first asserting the privilege, then producing some of the documents requested on an assertedly voluntary basis.

What the supreme court said in the Nixon case:

"To read the Article II powers of the President as providing an absolute privilege as against a subpoena essential to enforcement of criminal statutes on no more than a generalized claim of the public interest in confidentiality of nonmilitary and nondiplomatic discussions would upset the constitutional balance of 'a workable government' and gravely impair the role of the courts under Article III." Because Nixon had asserted only a generalized need for confidentiality, the Court held that the larger public interest in obtaining the truth in the context of a criminal prosecution took precedence.

Read more here:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_privilege

[Peggy Hall]

George Washington was the first to use Exec Privilege.  It was meant at that time to be a government interdepartmental order.  A far cry from it's use of today.