Those pushing to reject former President Donald Trump's claims to executive privilege after leaving office must be careful for what they wish for, according to legal expert Alan Dershowitz on Newsmax.
"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."
Dershowitz was talking about the anti-Trump House Jan. 6 Select Committee seeking to obtain Trump's private communications as president.
"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, after the Supreme Court denied a stay against the blocking the committee from Trump documents.
"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."
Trump will have a case on some documents under his executive privilege, despite being out of office, Dershowitz added.
"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."
Dershowitz also called on Congress to pass new laws on corporations' liability for autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence and denounced the newfangled censorship movements in America.
"I think the censorship that we have to worry about is less from the government, because the First Amendment protects that, but much more from private universities [and] universities that receive federal funding," Dershowitz said. "The open marketplace of ideas does not exist on many college campuses."
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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