should be protected under his claim of exec privilege and they range from call loggings, things that showed what was happening inside the west wing, inside the white house, in those key weeks and days around january 6th, including memos, handwritten notes written by mark meadows and other white house staff, white house lawyers who were seeing some of the activity that the former president was making, was involved in in trying to overturn the election results. obviously, for the committee, this is a very important step because they have a limited amount of time and they re trying to put together a story, a narrative of what was happening, what was the president thinking about in those key times. kate? absolutely. thanks for laying it out. nick ackerman served apz an assistant special prosecutor during walterg watergate. you cal this a significant decision for the rule of law. tell me why.
case, you can t use it for conversations in furtherance of criminal activity. with nixon, it was in furtherance of the conspiracy to obstruct the watergate chase. here it s relating to basically an insurrection that was perpetrated on the congress. and there s no way under any circumstance that any court is ever going to say that those conversations are legitimate, executive privilege covered conversations. the exec privilege relates to legitimate government business that the president is engaged in, most notably military actions, national security, and the like.engaged in, most notab military actions, national security, and the like. this is certainly why they re saying it doesn t make any difference whether trump is a sitting president or not. these conversations are not covered by executive privilege. you ve also said, nick, that between this supreme court decision on trump s records and
i think it will be difficult for them to justify not doing that given they ve already done this for steve bannon and they re trying to send a signal to other people they need to cooperate with the oversight and the subpoenas or they ll be in trouble. if they don t do it with meadows, their whole investigation honestly would be in jeopardy. i think there s some concern about that. with mark meadows in particular, more so than steve bannon, you know, you see the real importance of talking to him. this is a guy who was with donald trump in the white house on january 6th. he knows everything that happened that day. it s kind of hard to imagine that you could have a full investigation without talking to someone like this. so, you know, it would be surprising if they don t move forward, but obviously there s a debate about executive privilege. there is some concern among some of the members of the panel that perhaps mark meadows claim or donald trump s claim over mark meadows exec privile
the executive privilege fight. if you have exec privilege, a very weak privilege, qualified, she will be able to say anything she wants to. she no longer works for the white house. she will choose to stick to whatever the white house has said it is going to allow to be public. i think the question here is, how much she will share about what topics. remember the mueller report, she s the one running to donald trump saying, hey, there s going to be a story in these emails about trump tower. and it looks bad and he s saying don t talk to me, don t talk to me and then he s saying wait a minute, here s what we re going to write. and she was the one, their own spokesperson, the legal spokesperson who ultimately quit later told mueller that she said, well, if you read the
an answer on that, whether he s going to turn those memos over, as early as monday. what about the president s lawyer that he was going to file a complaint against former fbi director james comey? jacob, i think that s straight out of trump s trump s m.o. is something that he learned many years ago from his lawyer, the rate ray cohen, which is to always attack, never play defense. that works in some situations but in this particular circumstance, and based on what i know of it, i don t think there s any there there. the white house has already said that the president is not going toin voek executito invoke exec privilege. james comey made sure to not include classified information