House Judiciary Chair Jerrold Nadler explained why the Trump administration cannot use executive privilege to block portions of the Mueller report from being released to the public on this Sunday's Meet the Press:
CHUCK TODD: All right. Well, that brings us to this ambiguous phrase, right? "Executive privilege." And I'm just curious. Who gets to decide -- who gets to arbitrate this? Is this up to the attorney general?
REP. JERROLD NADLER: Well, no. The president must personally assert executive privilege. And I do not believe it exists here at all because, as we learned from the Nixon tapes case, executive privilege cannot hide -- cannot be used to hide wrongdoing. And in that case, the Supreme Court nine to nothing ordered that all the claims of executive privilege be overridden and the tapes be public. So I don’t think that executive -- I mean, the president may try to assert it, may try to hide things behind it. But I don't think that's right or be successful.
I want to say that we know a few other things which are very relevant here. We know that the president pressured the FBI director to go easy, to drop the investigation on Mike Flynn and some others. We know that he fired the FBI director for not giving him the personal loyalty that he demanded and for not dropping those investigations. We know that many of the president's closest associates, his national security advisor, campaign manager, et cetera, have been convicted of various crimes. And we know that he's waged a relentless two-year campaign to attack the law enforcement institutions, the FBI, the special prosecutor, all to demean the power --
CHUCK TODD: So don't you have enough evidence --
REP. JERROLD NADLER: -- of those people to --
CHUCK TODD: So is his --
REP. JERROLD NADLER: -- of those people to hold him accountable.
That won't stop them from trying. We'll get our first inkling when Barr makes his report available to Congress. Expect the Democrats to be forced to bring Mueller before their committees, as he said he'd do here, to get some answers about what's in the full report.
