In former President Donald Trump’s election case, Twitter tried to get permission to let President Trump know that special counsel Jack Smith was attempting to access his data. In so doing, they appealed to the full court—but the federal appeals court said on Tuesday that it would not get involved.
NTD spoke to Paul Kamenar, lead counsel at the National Legal and Policy Center, to find out more about the precedents being set—and the possible ramifications for the executive privilege of presidents past and future.
He quoted the dissent in the case, which stated that “Rather than follow established precedent, for the first time in American history, a court allowed access to presidential communications before any scrutiny of executive privilege.”
“The four judges did note that this sets a very dangerous precedent, not only for ex-presidents, but for sitting presidents as well,” Mr. Kamenar said. “Can you imagine that any president in office, all of a sudden, his tweets and phone records are being subpoenaed, or a search warrant rather, by the prosecutors—and they don’t know about it? I mean this is astounding.
“And so this does set a dangerous precedent,” he said.
“It’s amazing because in the Jan. 6 investigation, individuals who were at the Capitol, their phone records were also searched … but the person got a notice ahead of time saying, ‘Hey, we’re going after your phone records, you got 30 days to go to court and challenge it.’ And I did [challenge the phone record search] on behalf of a couple of them, and we won, so that’s not even grazing executive privilege! So here, it’s unfair for Donald Trump to be blindsided like this.”