Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz discussed a U.S. Supreme Court ruling this week striking down a request by former President Donald Trump to claim executive privilege over documents sought by the Jan. 6 Committee, calling it “absurd.”
“It would be absurd, unconstitutional to say that the current president can undo the former president’s executive privilege: It means there’s no executive privilege; it means that you can’t talk to your people in confidence,” Dershowitz warned on Saturday’s “America Right Now” program on Newsmax TV.
He was talking specifically about communications Trump sought to protect.
“The congressional committee said that a former president doesn’t have a right to invoke executive privilege: The court didn’t decide that,” Dershowitz told host Tom Basile.
“One of the justices in his concurrence made it clear that they haven’t yet decided the issue of whether President Trump can invoke executive privilege over the objections of the incumbent President [Joe] Biden, so that’s the most important issue,” he added.
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The constitutional law expert predicted that Trump will have a case on some documents under his executive privilege, despite being out of office.
“President Trump will invoke executive privilege and he’ll win as to some, he’ll lose as to some, and that’s very much in process,” Dershowitz said. “But the big issue whether the current president can stop the former president from invoking executive privilege has not yet been decided.”
In July, Dershowitz said that critics should not dismiss Trump’s lawsuits against three big tech companies.
He said that not only are critics “wrong” about the merits of the case, but they are also making a mistake to simply blow it off because it likely will decide legal precedent for decades to come regardless of whether it’s heard or not.
“All bets are off; this is a very important case; we don’t know how it will be decided,” Dershowitz told Newsmax then.
“But whatever way it is decided, it will frame the law for the rest of the 21st century in the age of high tech. That’s why it’s so important,” he continued.