00:00I'm Noah Feldman. I teach constitutional law at Harvard. For the first time in presidential
00:02history, President Trump is asserting executive privilege to keep private all conversations he
00:08has, not with his advisors in the White House, but with anyone he considers to be an advisor
00:12who could be outside the government. This is legally wrong, and here's why. The whole point
00:16of executive privilege is to protect the president's conversations with government
00:19officials, who are his close advisors, so that they can tell him what they're thinking. But the
00:23bottom line is, they all work for the U.S. government. They've all sworn an oath to protect
00:27the Constitution, so it's subject to conflict of interest laws. None of that applies to
00:30people from the outside of the government, and so if you allow them to have access to the
00:34president and say whatever they want, and he can say whatever he wants, and it's all private
00:37permanently, you're inviting the kind of cronyism, preference, and indeed corruption that has
00:41characterized the Trump administration since the beginning. This memo came out of the Office
00:45of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice, which, back in the good old days, really tried
00:48to attain independence and tried to stand for legitimacy in legal interpretations. They would
00:52do what the president wanted generally, but they would not do what the president wanted if
00:55it violated basically existing principles of law. This OLC clearly has no such constraints.
01:00Shocking part of the memo, OLC argues that ordinary citizens talking to the president
01:04won't speak their minds because of concern that it might appear improper when their words are
01:10actually disclosed, and that, they're saying, is a reason to keep it secret so that people can say
01:14whatever they want without worrying about whether it's going to appear wrong. Well, that's the
01:17whole reason to make sure the conversations between private parties and the president
01:20aren't privileged. It could look bad because it could be bad, and so we need to know about it.
01:24The most serious problem here, though, is the obvious one. The most corrupt president in our
01:27modern history, and maybe in all of our history, is pushing a theory according to which he will
01:31be able to communicate with his cronies and facilitate, you guessed it, more corruption.
01:36Congress and the courts should not let that become the law.
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