Re: Comey hearing
Posted: Wed Jun 14, 2017 11:07 pm
There is this thing called Executive Privilege. The President can invoke it and Comey doesn't have to answer. The thing is Trump didn't invoke it. Sessions is saying that one day in the future Trump might invoke it therefore I won't answer questions in the event in the future Trump decides to invoke Executive Privilege.
Jed Shugerman, law professor, Fordham University
Sessions’s argument is absurd, and the reason it’s absurd is that it turns the president’s executive privilege into any executive officer’s silence. The argument goes something like this: Because a president might one day, over the next three or four years, change his mind and invoke executive privilege, I am permanently silenced by that looming privilege invocation in the future, so that I have to be permanently silenced, no matter who’s asking. There is just no legal basis for that.
Honestly, it’s a ridiculous argument, and it raises questions about Attorney General Sessions’s competence in office. His lack of preparation and his inability to put forward a coherent legal argument showed his disrespect for the process, the senate, and the office of the attorney general. He embarrassed himself by coming to this hearing totally unprepared to answer a question everyone knew he would be asked.
Jed Shugerman, law professor, Fordham University
Sessions’s argument is absurd, and the reason it’s absurd is that it turns the president’s executive privilege into any executive officer’s silence. The argument goes something like this: Because a president might one day, over the next three or four years, change his mind and invoke executive privilege, I am permanently silenced by that looming privilege invocation in the future, so that I have to be permanently silenced, no matter who’s asking. There is just no legal basis for that.
Honestly, it’s a ridiculous argument, and it raises questions about Attorney General Sessions’s competence in office. His lack of preparation and his inability to put forward a coherent legal argument showed his disrespect for the process, the senate, and the office of the attorney general. He embarrassed himself by coming to this hearing totally unprepared to answer a question everyone knew he would be asked.