re: #89 Hecuba’s daughter

Legal question: If the government is not paying you for your services, can you claim executive privilege? What private conversations are legally protected that could apply in this situation? Certainly not client-lawyer privilege.

Not my area of expertise, but I don’t think there’s a lot of case law on what constitutes executive privilege even generally, let alone specifically. But I do believe, at least based on tradition, that the president has been able to claim executive privilege with respect to conversations with non-government employees/private citizens. The idea being that sometimes the president/executive branch needs to talk to people not in the government to get different perspectives/ideas/advice and that those conversations, as part of the deliberative process, are protected.

But I don’t know if there’s case law about who holds the privilege and who can waive it and all that fun stuff.