Republicans in Congress aren’t doing much these days, opting to just let President Donald Trump do whatever he wants. That apparently frees them up to spend all their time launching investigations into the mental fitness of former President Joe Biden. And because this ongoing probe is clearly the most urgent issue facing America today, Trump has waived executive privilege for nine Biden aides. This means they will be forced to testify before Congress and answer whatever unhinged questions people like Sen. Ron Johnson and Rep. James Comey come up with.
It’s all part of Trump’s ceaseless and pathetic attempts to undo the Biden presidency. So now there are four congressional investigations into whether Biden is old. The Department of Justice also launched an investigation, at Trump’s demand, to determine whether Biden signed things with an autopen because apparently, if he did, it’s all unconstitutional? It’s not at all clear what the goal is here, save for dragging Biden’s name through the mud to support whatever unhinged conspiracy theories Congress and the DOJ are pursuing.
Executive privilege ensures that presidents and their advisers can be candid in discussing issues without worrying that those communications will become public. This makes sense, because you do actually want a president and advisers who fully weigh multiple options and engage in frank debate. But it isn’t an absolute privilege. Congress has the power to seek information from the executive branch in the course of investigations, and since congressional Republicans are engaged in a full-court press into Biden’s mental state, they want his aides to appear before them and testify. As with Trump’s autopen theory, it’s not clear what this would achieve. Biden was president for four years, and the things he did during those four years cannot be magicked away by pretending that he wasn’t.
Related | Democrats walk out of sham GOP hearing into Biden’s ‘mental fitness’
It isn’t that Trump doesn’t have the power to do this. Unlike so many other things he’s doing, presidents do possess the ability to waive an assertion of executive privilege made by a former president. It’s what Biden did when the Jan. 6 committee sought White House communications related to the insurrection, calling it a “unique and extraordinary” circumstance, which, well, yes. Learning how much the president and his advisers participated in the planning of an insurrection is sort of necessary.
The myriad investigations into Biden, on the other hand, are a nonsense sham. Nevertheless, Trump waived privilege for the Biden aides, saying there are “exceptional circumstances” because they are investigating whether Biden aides “concealed information regarding his fitness … and may have unconstitutionally exercised those powers themselves to aid in their concealment.”
Come on.
Unsurprisingly, Trump used to have a much more expansive view of executive privilege. He invoked it to try to prevent Congress from seeing the full Mueller report about Russian interference in the 2016 election. He tried to use it to prevent Congress from questioning former Attorney General William Barr and former Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross about the Trump administration’s attempt to add a citizenship question to the census.
Even after losing the 2020 election, Trump kept trying to use executive privilege to shield his wrongdoings. In 2021, he sued the House to stop Congress from accessing White House papers about Trump’s actions and communications around Jan. 6 and to prevent the testimony of his former adviser Steve Bannon. He also claimed executive privilege to get America’s Most Malleable Judge, Aileen Cannon, to indulge his claim and appoint a special master to review the classified documents Trump illegally retained and then hid in a bathroom at Mar-a-Lago.
Executive privilege is also the basis for Trump’s refusal to even explain what the Department of Government Efficiency is. In a lawsuit brought by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics about whether DOGE is subject to the Freedom of Information Act, Trump asserted the privilege to say that even asking what kind of entity DOGE is interferes with the separation of powers. It’s a ridiculous argument, but one that the conservative majority at the Supreme Court seems fine with.
So, to recap: Determining if Joe Biden occasionally mixed up someone’s name or used an autopen is a national security crisis that demands testimony from everyone surrounding Biden. Determining if Donald Trump worked with Russia to influence the 2016 election and his level of involvement in the Jan. 6 insurrection is no big deal, and it is unfair of Congress to even ask about it. Call it executive privilege for me, but not for thee.