Dr. Naomi Wolf's Outspoken

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit naomiwolf.substack.com/subscribe

Stephen K Bannon, the former chief strategist of President Trump’s White House — also a former Goldman Sachs Mergers and Acquisitions specialist, who graduated with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University, as well as an MBA from Harvard; co-founder of the Government Accountability Institute; former member of the principals committee of the National Security Council; and a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant — has been sentenced to four months in prison, and a fine of $6500, for contempt of Congress. (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/21/us/politics/steve-bannon-sentence-contempt-congress.html) His lawyers have said that they will appeal. (Disclosure: While I disagree with Steve Bannon about many political issues, I also respect him for a number of reasons. I speak to him regularly as a guest on his podcast War Room. But the concern about which I want to speak now has nothing to do with Mr. Bannon personally, or with his case specifically; my essay relates to the broader picture).I believe that this is a dark time for America: because banana republics will “banana republic.” Those on the Left now cheering the debanking, deplatforming, silencing, arrests, the shackling in handcuffs and leg irons, and the bankrupting of those on the Right, or of independent critics of this administration, should realize that there is nothing to cheer for. They should understand that in an increasingly repressive reality, history shows that each future administration will be devoured by its successor. The unitary, nonpartisan rule of law, in a robust Republic, in contrast, protects us all. It is also a dark day for America, whatever your partisan views may be, because of the risk that today’s current media effort to revise or discard wholesale the often-distinguished heritage of Presidential confidentiality, represents to future American Presidencies, of any party. In the current media discussion that seeks inaccurately to limit the definition of, and thus to unravel, the two-hundred-year-old tradition of keeping discussions with the President confidential, I see a serious threat to our nation’s future. Legacy media are recasting “executive privilege”, or the tradition of keeping discussions with the President confidential, as a flimsy, archaic fig leaf; as something that, if it exists at all, is only clearly and narrowly and legally defined. To me, this effort is both scary and ahistorical. The media is erasing and then re-writing the long and august American heritage and personal commitment of “executive privilege” — a tradition that does not appear in the Constitution, but which has protected our nation in many ways, throughout its history: “The Constitution is silent on the executive power to withhold information from the courts or Congress; the privilege is rooted in the separation of powers doctrine that divides the power of the United States government into legislative, executive and judicial branches.” [https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/executive_privilege] In a way that makes me feel as if the world in which I was a young White House spouse had been turned upside-down, the media in 2022 is rewriting the act of respecting executive privilege — keeping confidential one’s conversations with the President — as an example somehow of a lack of ethics, whereas in my experience as a witness to events, and later as a campaign participant, in the Clinton-Gore years, respecting executive privilege — keeping confidential conversations with the President — was understood to reveal, rather, the fact that one had ethics. This 2007 memo by Aziz Huq, of The Brennan Center for Justice, shows how “executive privilege” used to be defined — that is, before the current media revision of the concept [https://www.brennancenter.org/issues]: “Background on Executive Privilege”“Executive privilege refers to a wide variety of evidentiary and substantive privileges. Despite its importance, executive privilege has never been conclusively defined by Congress or the executive branch. [Italics mine]. An executive order issued on November 1, 2001, however, catalogues the most important species of executive privilege claims: The President’s constitutionally based privileges subsume privileges for records that reflect: [1] military, diplomatic, or national security secrets (the state secrets privilege); [2] communications of the President or his advisors (the presidential communications privilege); [3] legal advice or legal work (the attorney-client or attorney work product privileges); and [4] the deliberative processes of the President or his advisors.The most extensive discussion of these varieties of executive privilege is found in federal case law. (When Congress and the executive have clashed over privilege issues, their resolutions of the conflicts have not yielded precise formulations. Congress tends to use blunt instruments, such as the purse power or confirmation authority, to extract concessions from the executive. The infrequent e