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President? a year, two years? how long do you protect the possibility? there is nonsense. there is no such thing as a protection of the possibility the president might invoke executive privilege because the president has to invoke executive privilege ask then it could be challenged because the president in fact may not have a right to executive privilege because maybe they re talking about criminal activity, as existed in watergate. and then there was no executive privilege. so the point is you can invoke executive privilege, but it may be an invalid invokatiocation. i want to follow up on that. for a white house that tends to be maximalist and assertive, why don t they just invoke privilege? the reason they don t do that is because that could be contested in court. they don t want to go into a court and have to open that pandora s box. not only wrongdoing but ....
Criminali criminality. bob, would you be advising the same thing if you were in the white house counsel s office, which is if we assert privilege, we are then marching ourselves into a judicial process that is going to be devoted to questioning whether there s evidence of wrongdoing? well, yes. i think eventually that s what you face. in the short term, you face a fairly sensational bit of news, which is that the president decides to invoke executive privilege with respect to a number of issues that would be raised with attorney general sessions, including, for example, whether he had any conversations with the president about firing special counsel mueller or any other aspect of the russia investigation. he was in a position to say, no. he really couldn t do that. he couldn t discuss those matters because he was preserving, as the congresswoman just said, the potential for invoking the privilege in the future. sessions invoked executive i mean this potential of executive privi ....
Sessions could cite executive privilege when the president himself had not done so. joining me now senator and b bob bower. bob, in my experience, people that served as white house tend to be executive power maximalists. i wonder if you think it s fine for someone who serves in an administration to sort of proactively not answer on the off chance that privilege might be invoked over those conversations? i don t think it was inadvertent. i think this was a quite deliberate strategy to not have the president invoke executive privilege, which would have been highly controversial, but in effect have attorney general sessions come to the same place. he didn t alert the committee that this was an issue. he came prepared to argue this vague confidentiality concern that was linked to executive ....
The chair is going to exercise its right to allow the witnesses to answer the question. the senator will mr. rosenstein, would you like to thoroughly answer the question. thank you. that prompted this response from senator elizabeth warren, silencing senator harris for not being courteous enough is unbelievable. keep fighting. then at today s hearing, the samg thing happened. senator john mccain who is not a full time member of the senate intelligence committee but as ex officio status, interrupted senator harris while she was questioning attorney general jeff sessions about doj policies on executive privilege, appropria prompting once again chairman to intervene. i m asking you about the doj policy. it s a policy that goes just beyond the attorney general. is that policy in writing somewhere? i think so. so did you not consult it before you came before this committee knowing we would ask you questions about that? well, we talked about it. the policy is did you as ....
Be the attorney general. and let me just say one specific thing. the attorney general is a very unique position in the president s cabinet. it demands a level of independence, objectivity, a focus on the rule of law. and clearly what we saw here was more of a partisan to the president than someone who was focused as our chief law enforcement officer in dealing with threats to our country and getting to the bottom in a forthcoming way, in a transparent way to what the facts are, what we re dealing with right now. and contrast him to comey, who had specific remembrances, who had credible recall. and we have sessions here who is invoking a level of executive privilege that hasn t been asserted, who doesn t recall contacts with ambassadors. i m a united states senator. i remember my conversations with ambassadors from different countries and what i discussed. this whole thing to me is just ....