General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: It looks like ex-president has the right to claim executive privilege for conversations they had [View all]onenote
(42,692 posts)Tribe suggests that Trump can't assert EP because he's not president, stating: "Executive privilege is for the incumbent chief executive to assert. That statement is directly contradicted by the GSA case, to which Tribe makes no reference.
Eggleston also fails to acknowledge, let alone cite, the clear statements from the Supreme Court that a former president can assert EP. Instead, he suggests that the Court decided in GSA "that the current president is the right person to make judgments about the assertion of executive privilege." In fact, while the Court acknowledged that an incumbent president's opposition to a former president's claim of executive privilege "detracts" from the weight of the former president's EP claim, but the Court nowhere states, or even suggests, that the position of the incumbent is, in and of itself, determinative of whether that claim will or won't be upheld.
And I suspect that both Eggleston and Tribe actually know this. Imagine a scenario where Trump had decided to willy-nilly release Obama communications with Biden and Obama, as former president had objected on EP grounds. The issue wouldn't be resolved against Obama simply because Trump was the incumbent. It would be resolved on the strength or weakness of the argument that the release of the material served an overriding public interest -- the standard that Biden has cited in rejecting Trump's claim and the standard that should be applied in resolving this dispute.