Considering that the OP is about Trump and Mueller, the comments about Clinton are a distraction and of no help.
If Mueller is doing his job, he should be hot on Clinton's trail. But once again, this is not about the truth or justice, it's a witch hunt to usurp our constitution and remove a duly elected president from office, based on false allegations. Exactly what the Founding Fathers created the seperation of powers for.
Please explain what you mean by the Separation of Powers?
Then consider the number of EO's issued by Trump, compared with the number of EO's of recent presidents, here:
Trump has signed more executive orders than any president in the last 50 years - CNNPolitics
Irrelevant partisan BS! Executive orders have nothing to do with asserting executive privilege!
executive privilege
Also found in:
Dictionary,
Encyclopedia,
Wikipedia.
Executive Privilege
The right of the president of the United States to withhold information from Congress or the courts.
Historically, presidents have claimed the right of executive privilege when they have information they want to keep confidential, either because it would jeopardize national security or because disclosure would be contrary to the interests of the
Executive Branch.
As the courts have ruled on these claims, their decisions have refined the notion of executive privilege and have clarified the instances in which it can be invoked. The courts have ruled that it is implicit in the constitutional
Separation of Powers, which assigns discrete powers and rights to the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government. In reality, however, the three branches enjoy not separate but shared powers, and thus are occasionally in conflict. When the president's wish to keep certain information confidential causes such a conflict, the president might claim the right of executive privilege.
The term
executive privilege emerged in the 1950s, but presidents since
George Washington have claimed the right to withhold information from Congress and the courts. The issue first arose in 1792, when a congressional committee requested information from Washington regarding a disastrous expedition of General Arthur St. Clair against American Indian tribes along the Ohio River, which resulted in the loss of an entire division of the U.S. Army. Washington, concerned about how to respond to this request and about the legal precedent his actions would set, called a cabinet meeting. Although no official record was kept of the proceedings,
Thomas Jefferson described the deliberations in his diary. The participants, Jefferson wrote, concluded that Congress had the right to request information from the president and that the president "ought to communicate such papers as the public good would permit & ought to refuse those the disclosure of which would injure the public." In the case at hand, they agreed that "there was not a paper which might not be properly produced," so Washington provided all the documents that Congress had requested. This event, though notable as the first recorded deliberation concerning executive privilege, did not carry precedential value until after 1957, when Jefferson's notes were discovered. In 1958, Attorney General William P. Rogers cited Jefferson's remarks as precedent for an absolute presidential privilege. Legal scholar Raoul Berger declaimed Rogers's arguments as "at best self serving assertions by one of the claimants in a constitutional boundary dispute." Instead, Berger argued, Washington's willingness to turn over the requested documents shows his recognition of Congress's right to such materials.
In subsequent incidents, however, Washington and his successors did choose to withhold requested information from Congress, citing various reasons. In 1794, for example, the Senate requested from Washington the correspondence of Gouverneur Morris, the U.S. ambassador to France, who was suspected of aiding the French aristocrats against the revolutionaries despite the United States' official stance of neutrality. Washington provided the letters, but he censored them first, acting on the advice of officials such as Attorney General
William Bradford, who said that the president should "communicate to the Senate such parts of the said correspondence as upon examination he shall deem safe and proper to disclose: withholding all such, as any circumstances, may render improper to be communicated." The following year, Washington refused to provide the House with information relating to Ambassador John Jay's negotiation of a treaty with Great Britain, arguing that the House had no constitutional right to participate in the treaty making process and so had no right to request materials associated with it.
The judiciary, like Congress, can also request information from the president. When
Aaron Burr was indicted on charges of
Treason, for example, both Congress and the judiciary asked President Jefferson to provide correspondence from General James Wilkinson, a Burr confidant and aide. Jefferson argued that it was wrong to ask him to provide private letters, written to him, containing confidential information. Chief Justice
John Marshall, presiding over the Burr trial,
United States v. Burr, 25 Fed. Cas. 187, 191 (C.C. Va. 1807), did not ultimately force Jefferson to turn over each requested document, but he did maintain the right of the judiciary to request such information from the president, writing that "the President of the United States may be … required to produce any paper in his possession" and adding that "[t]he occasion for demanding it ought, in such a case, [to] be very strong, and to be fully shown to the court before its production could be insisted on."
