Communications that President Donald Trump has with advisers who don’t even work for his administration can be protected by executive privilege, the Justice Department said in a memo Monday evening that comes amid lawsuits and a possible Democratic takeover of Congress.
The legal memo boldly formalizes an aggressive stance the past administrations had nodded to but never publicly laid out so comprehensively.
“Restricting executive privilege to purely intragovernmental communications would foreclose the President from relying on an array of important sources that he may find necessary to the effective discharge of his responsibilities of office,” the new opinion from the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel said. “Such an outcome not only would impair the President’s Article II functions, but ultimately would harm the public itself.”
Before Trump, fights over protections for presidential communications with private advisers were uncommon because presidents were rarely depending on individuals outside the executive branch for private conversations that shaped public policy.
But Trump has been known to seek input from a constellation of allies outside the White House, including from Congress, the business world and childhood friends.
