Snow Responds To Executive Privilege Flip-Flop ‘Making Its Way Through The Left-Wing Blogs’

Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow told the National Review’s Byron York that “[w]e feel pretty comfortable with the constitutional argument” that White House officials don’t have to testify under oath to Congress about the prosecutor purge.

But as Glenn Greenwald first noted, Snow had a much different view of executive privilege in 1998, when President Clinton was using it to resist having his aides testify in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky saga. On 3/29/98, Snow published an op-ed titled, “Executive Privilege is a Dodge“:

Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for anything. He would have a constitutional right to cover up.

During today’s press briefing, a reporter asked Snow about the inconsistencies between his flip-flop. Snow said that “this is not an entirely analogous situation” and that he would “let others do the legal arguing.” Watch it:

Wondering how the reporter heard about his 1998 op-ed, Snow snidely asked the reporter, “Is it making its way through the left-wing blogs?”

Transcript:

REPORTER: Tony, back when President Clinton was citing executive privilege to keep internal deliberations in that White House from being talked about in Congress, you wrote — now famously — that taken

SNOW: I didn’t know it was famous. It didn’t that kind of coverage at the time.

REPORTER: It’s become more famous.

SNOW: Is it making its way through the left-wing blogs?

REPORTER: But you wrote quite eloquently about this. You said, “Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable. He would have a constitutional right to cover up.” So why were you wrong then and right now?

SNOW: Because you’re — this is not an entirely analogous situation. I just told you what we have in fact offered to make available to Members of Congress. What we’re doing is we are holding apart confidential communications between advisers and the President. And that is pretty standard practice in the White House.

REPORTER: But in the Clinton administration –

SNOW: I’m not so sure. I’ll let others do the legal arguing on that.