Posted on 06/20/2012 1:27:30 PM PDT by servo1969
Wow!
Wow!
From a lawyer’s point of view, it’s hard to imagine anything more stupid than for the Obama White House to assert executive privilege as to the Fast and Furious documents. The subpoenaed documents must have some pretty damning information for the White House to make this move.
More than that, by having asserted the privilege, the lawyer-led White House showed either a profound misunderstanding of the nature of privilege or is conceding that the Fast and Furious scandal — which saw the Justice Department pour thousands of guns into criminal hands in Mexico, resulting in the murders of two American law enforcement officers and untold numbers of Mexican and American civilians — goes all the way up to the White House.
Wow!
If you’re wondering why those two conclusions (either the White House is dumb as a collective post or guilty as sin), here’s a little information about legal “privileges.” Once a case is in the legal system, the law imposes upon each party a duty to reveal information, provided that the opposing party properly requests that information. When I’m advising people who are contemplating litigation, I always warn them that filing suit means giving up lots of their privacy. They’ll be required to turn over vast numbers of documents and to answer intrusive questions, provided that the other side can credibly show that the information sought is reasonably likely to lead to the discovery of admissible evidence.
A typical (and appropriate) discovery request might read “Please produce all communications between you and any realtors other than the defendant regarding the sale of your home at 123 Any Road in Nowhere Town.” Those “communications” would cover writings, emails, phone messages, etc. I’ve worked on cases that have involved the production of hundreds of thousands of pages, answers to hundreds of questions, and innumerable live depositions.
There are relationships, however, that the law considers so important it insulates from discovery or testimony any original communications between the parties to those relationships. The law will not involve itself in trying to ferret out communications between a priest and a penitent, nor will it interfere with the bond between husband and wife. Likewise, recognizing that an attorney cannot give counsel to a client without full and free communications between the two, the law protects any direct communications between an attorney and his client.
In my years as an attorney, I would have to say that “attorney client privilege” is the privilege I see asserted with the greatest frequency. What I also see is lawyers who assert it in the hope that no one notices that a lawyer isn’t actually involved in the communication at issue — or, at least, wasn’t involved initially.
The deal is that you cannot shield otherwise unprivileged information by lodging it with your attorney. For example, if your corporate client has a memo on file that says “I’ve got a great idea for defrauding our competitor,” your client cannot prevent the other side from discovering that document by mailing it to you, the lawyer, with a cover letter saying, “You need to know about this document.” However, to the extent your client writes you a long letter explaining everything he knows about the case, good and bad, that letter to you is privileged. In the same way, your response explaining the legal consequences of the events described in the letter is also privileged.
More simply put: in order to assert any legal privilege, both of the parties covered under the privilege must have participated in the communication and must have exchanged original information that does not exist independent of the privilege.
Because of the way privilege operates, we can understand Obama’s assertion of executive privilege in only three ways.
(1) Obama’s White House was either involved in Fast and Furious, which is bad;
(2) or it means that Obama’s White House doesn’t understand the nature of a privilege, which is embarrassing, especially with a lawyer at the helm;
(3) or it means that the documents Holder is hiding are so dreadful that Obama’s White House would rather risk looking criminal or stupid than take the risk of allowing Congress and the public to see those documents.
No matter how you look at it, by inserting itself into this struggle between Holder’s Justice Department, on the one hand, and Congress, on the other hand, the White House made an already bad situation look much, much worse.
‘Obama goes Nixon, claims executive privilege on F&F’
Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa notes that this means that Obama is claiming privilege for documents it has been claimed he never saw.
AP:
“The assertion of executive privilege raises monumental questions,” Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley said in a statement released Wednesday shortly after the president’s move. “How can the President assert executive privilege if there was no White House involvement? How can the President exert executive privilege over documents he’s supposedly never seen? Is something very big being hidden to go to this extreme? The contempt citation is an important procedural mechanism in our system of checks and balances. The questions from Congress go to determining what happened in a disastrous government program for accountability and so that it’s never repeated again.”
Grassley is the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee and has previously called a Justice Department investigation into the “Fast and Furious” gunrunning operation “botched.”
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/06/obama_goes_nixon_claims_executive_privilege_on_ff.html
Seems Holder retracted that accusation.
I find it very interesting and underappreciated that he retracted that accusation.
Vote next week
Here a phone numbers and addresses of congress critters. Let them hear from you. As many as thirty Rats may vote with the majority.
Holder feet to the fire!
Ban the sale of high capacity mags and or semi-auto rifles?
I mean, really. Obozo seems to be throwing all kinds of stuff up against the wall to see what sticks.
Damn, I thought I'd seen it all with Slick Willey. This guy makes Clinton look like a sophomoric little horn dog teenager unable to control his urges.
Obozo’s truly a Marxist.
I think they are only claiming EP for that part of the documentation set that involves discussions with the White House, so a partial claim is possible if there have been no releases of such communications (which I think is the case).
I don't think this is necessarily an either-or proposition. I think they are BOTH dumb as a post AND guilty as sin.
Vote next week
Here a phone numbers and addresses of congress critters. Let them hear from you. As many as thirty Rats may vote with the majority.
Holder feet to the fire!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2895739/posts
bookmark
The retraction doesn’t matter. The original accusation was out there for a couple of news cycles so it has become truth.
I’m sure they are busy wrting the script now for the next movie: “All the President’s Contemptuous Butt-Monkeys.”
What the hell does law have to do with it when you have the MSM covering for you and the threat of major riots as your ace in the hole
Now it’s 0bama’s turn to stonewall F&F. He will claim some alternate definition of Executive Privilege and defy anyone to prove him wrong. The MSM will carry that water into the gates of hell for him.
NOPE: Does not need to go to the Senate, thank God or it would die there.
The House can vote and if the yeas prevail, hold the most corrupt, biased, racist, Atty General this country has ever had, in contempt on its own.
Another aspect of claiming Executive Privelege is that Holder no longer has the option of submitting the documents before the vote takes place in the full House.
To do so would be a violation of Executive Privelege!
This WILL go to a full House vote.
Before the final vote to approve a contempt resolution against Holder, the committee passed an amendment with many reasons why Obama's executive privilege is not valid. Some of the reasons include the fact that the time Obama should have claimed executive privilege was 8 months ago when Eric Holder was first called to testify, and also the fact that the president has not even claimed executive privilege and instead they have heard it from the DOJ who is not authorized to invoke the privilege.
So has the White House (aka Obama) actually invoked the much ballyhooed Executive Privilege or hasn't it?
Shows more stupid than anything to me. Really by this point shouldn’t they all know it never works. No president has ever gotten executive privilege to stick. Of course with an election he’s looking like he might lose looming it might actually work for him, just drag the process out another few month and nobody will care.
.....please do not hesitate to contact this office if we can be (of is missing) assistance .....
holders request to obama
where is obamas reply?????
Historically most such pardons are issued in the last couple of days the President is in office. In other words, sometime in January before the new POTUS is sworn in.
Thank you for this post & hoosiermama for the ping.
I’m wondering if they panicked & outed themselves accidentally. Anyway, it’s done now. What’s really beautiful is that there are at least a few dems who know it- and most wondrous of all, they aren’t getting immediately piled on. That’s *really* unusual.
Another aspect of this that has gone completely unnoticed...since F&F involved running guns across an international border, the State Department had to have known about it and approved....meaning Hilliary Clinton is involved.
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