CNN’s Chris Wallace Says Smacking Down Trump Officials’ Privilege Claims ‘Is Going To Be An Easy One’ For Garland To Win

CNN anchor Chris Wallace said knocking down claims of executive privilege from ex-President Donald Trump and his senior officials “is going to be an easy one” for Attorney General Merrick Garland‘s Justice Department to win in court.

In the latest of the  heightened chatter about Garlands’s investigation that’s been sparked by the January 6 hearings, a new CNN exclusive report says that DoJ lawyers are “preparing to fight in court to force former White House officials to testify about then-President Donald Trump’s conversations and actions around January 6.”

Wallace was a guest on Friday morning’s edition of CNN’s New Day, during which he told co-anchors John Berman and Brianna Keilar that defeating those claims of executive privilege will be “easy” and that “Trump’s executive privilege rights are very weak”:

This question of executive privilege, and the Justice Department — going to have to take a test case. There’s no question about that, because former President Trump is invoking executive privilege. We’ve heard from a number of people, in Pat Cipollone‘s testimony, deposition to the January 6 committee. Whenever the question came up, “what did you say to the president? What did the president say to you?”

He wouldn’t answer that. He answered a lot of other questions.

And we now have learned that both Marc Short and Greg Jacob, two aides to Vice President Pence when they were talking to the federal grand jury, when anything ever came up about “what did you say?”

Because they were in that meeting where the president was reportedly pressing Mike Pence to, you know, on January 6, to reject some of the electoral votes. They wouldn’t answer that question.

So this is a barrier that is going to have to be discussed and going to be litigated by the courts. And it seems to me not that — I’m not a lawyer. I don’t even play one on TV, but I am a political historian, if you will. And it just seems to me this is going to be an easy one for the Justice Department to win.

Ever since the Nixon tapes, when the Supreme Court by a nine nothing vote in 1974 said, you know, I know you’ve invoked executive privilege for President Nixon, but you got to turn over the White House tapes. The courts have basically said it’s a balancing act, executive privilege versus the right of a criminal grand jury to get access to evidence about a crime, as was pointed out by Mulvaney.

I would say that Trump’s executive privilege rights are very weak, given that he’s no longer even the president. And conversely, the rights of the grand jury to investigate the worst insurrection against the Capitol since 1814 are pretty strong. So they’re going to have to be litigated. But I would bet that the courts will basically say, no, executive privilege doesn’t count here. You’ve got to testify.

Watch above via CNN.

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