The Daily Background
| Is the White House now claiming executive privilege on everything by default?
by Arlen Parsa
I think at this point, the White House is in a mode where they automatically reject any congressional requests or subpoenas by claiming executive privilege. At this rate, they will claim executive privilege on General Petraeus’ absurdly-revered Grand September Report on the situation in Iraq… Here’s the latest example of Executive Privilege Fever:
The White House has refused to give Congress documents about the death of former NFL player Pat Tillman, with White House counsel Fred F. Fielding saying that certain papers relating to discussion of the friendly-fire shooting “implicate Executive Branch confidentiality interests.”
[…]
The military at first concocted a heroic story about how Tillman, a specialist posthumously promoted to corporal, had been killed in a fierce firefight with the enemy, despite obvious evidence that he had been shot by his own men at close range. More than a month later, a military investigation reported publicly that the death was not linked to enemy fire.“The main focus of the committee’s investigation is to examine what the White House and the leadership of the Department of Defense knew about Corporal Tillman’s death and when they knew it,” Waxman and Davis said in a letter to Fielding. “Unfortunately, the document production from the White House sheds virtually no light on these matters.”
Here’s the thing, Waxman wants to know what the White House knew, and when they knew it before it was reported in the press. And the White House has said that Bush only learned the truth behind Tillman’s death until it was reported in the press.
But they’re claiming executive privilege, and it’s my understanding that E.P. protects only records and testimony relating to the president directly– in other words, conversations that Bush took part in, or memos he saw, etc (the same goes for the US Attorney Purge Scandal in which the Administration has also cited E.P. in refusing to comply with subpoenas and ordering former aides not to comply with subpoenas).
So, in theory, either the White House is saying that Bush knew about this before it became public, or they’re incorrectly asserting E.P. I could be totally wrong, but it looks to me an awful lot like a catch-22.
