Congress

Trump’s U-turn on White House secrecy could reshape how future presidents get advice

Published

1 year ago

July 10, 2025

President Donald Trump is trying to force Joe Biden’s former White House aides to divulge confidential discussions to congressional investigators — using the same tactics he once warned would “do grave damage” to the presidency and the republic.

Trump’s White House lawyers, in a series of recent letters to Biden aides, said the aides should provide “unrestricted testimony” to a House GOP-led investigation into Biden’s health and whether advisers covered up his frailty while in office.

To facilitate that testimony, Trump has agreed to “waive” any claims of executive privilege, the legal shield that presidents typically use to maintain the secrecy of candid conversations between a president and close confidants. That protection doesn’t expire when a president leaves office, but the incumbent president has the power to undo it.

Trump’s decision could leave Biden’s aides vulnerable to GOP lawmakers’ demands that they disclose some of the most sensitive details of their conversations with Biden — or risk being held in contempt of Congress and facing criminal charges.

It’s a dynamic Trump once decried when the roles were reversed: Biden, as president, authorized former White House aides from Trump’s first term to reveal confidential information to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and the monthslong campaign by Trump to subvert the 2020 election results. Now, in his second term, Trump’s White House hinted at that history as a justification for compelling Biden’s aides to testify.

“The President reached this view consistent with the practice established under the Biden administration,” read a letter from White House deputy counsel Gary Lawkowski to former Biden staff secretary Neera Tanden, who testified as part of the investigation last month.

Biden’s post-presidential office declined to comment on the unfolding investigation. The Trump White House declined to comment on the record, but a senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the administration views Trump’s privilege waiver as less “dangerous” than Biden’s.

The probe into Biden’s health is being led by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), who dogged Biden for his final two years in office with an investigation into his family’s business dealings. Comer is now demanding testimony from many of Biden’s top White House advisers to determine whether Biden’s health declined while in office and whether anyone concealed any purported decline from the public. The investigation includes a review of whether aides ever acted on Biden’s behalf without his awareness.

Comer has said he views the handling of Biden’s health as a “conspiracy” and a “cover-up.” Democrats say the investigation is a politically motivated stunt to settle scores with Trump’s vanquished adversary. And they say the issue has diminished salience now that Biden has retreated from public life.

Even though Trump has waived executive privilege for the Comer probe, there are other avenues for aides to sidestep testimony. Kevin O’Connor, Biden’s physician while in office, cited doctor-patient confidentiality, but also his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination Wednesday in declining to answer the committee’s questions — a path well-worn by witnesses called to testify by Jan. 6 investigators. It’s unclear whether others called in the Biden probe will adopt O’Connor’s strategy.

Despite the procedural parallels, Biden’s choice to lift secrecy protections occurred under very different circumstances than Trump’s. Biden waived the privilege in order to assist the investigation of an unprecedented assault on the underpinnings of democracy. In contrast, Trump has waived the privilege in hopes of bolstering a roving exploration of Biden’s mental health based on claims, largely from Republicans, that Biden was cognitively incapable of making decisions as president.

Biden aides have dismissed those claims as unfounded. Still, numerous reports about Biden’s diminished capacity, and an entire book on the subject by two prominent journalists, have fueled the GOP push.

A dangerous precedent

Some constitutional experts see Trump’s privilege waiver as a troubling sign of a vicious cycle in which presidents of one party will routinely seek to disclose confidential conversations of prior administrations of the opposite party. Indeed, Trump himself warned of that cycle of vengeance when he opposed Biden’s waiver of executive privilege during the Jan. 6 probe.

If the trend continues, experts say it could lead presidential advisers to shy away from blunt or politically sensitive advice they fear could be disclosed by a political adversary.

“Presidential advisers now avoid as much as possible creating public records of their advice to presidents,” said Mark Rozell, an expert on executive privilege at George Mason University. “Waiving executive privilege will potentially make aides avoid being completely candid in their internal deliberations due to fear of disclosure and future investigations.”

Others are more circumspect, saying federal employees are already well-schooled in the principle that anything they say behind closed doors could wind up public — in investigations, in court or in leaks from their colleagues.

But Trump’s willingness to waive the privilege is dangerous for a different reason, according to Rebecca Ingber, a constitutional law scholar at Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law School. His U-turn on the issue — despite the concerns he previously expressed about the importance of the privilege — is further evidence of his willingness to “simply destroy the norms that typically used to govern these inter-branch disputes,” Ingber said.

Peter Shane, a constitutional law expert at New York University, said “if Trump’s thirst for revenge overcomes his protectiveness of the presidency as an institution, I do think that is up to him.

“As for whether Trump has any political price to pay for contradicting himself,” Shane continued, “I can only say, he doesn’t seem to have paid any price so far for his inconsistencies.”

Trump’s dire warning

Executive privilege isn’t written in law or the Constitution, but it has roots stretching back to George Washington and was recognized by the Supreme Court during the Watergate scandal as an important — but limited — protection for the presidency. The idea behind the privilege is that secrecy is necessary for the president to receive candid advice to deal with the most sensitive and controversial subjects facing the nation.

Historically, even when the White House has changed parties, presidents respected the wishes of their predecessors to maintain the secrecy of records and communications — in part because they knew they would become former presidents one day and wished to preserve both their own records and the strength of the presidency itself.

That calculus changed after Trump orchestrated a nationwide push to overturn the results of the 2020 election, leading a campaign to undermine the certified results and assembling a rally that later morphed into a violent riot on Jan. 6, 2021. The Democrat-led congressional committee established to investigate the attack (after Republicans killed a proposed bipartisan commission) quickly pursued Trump’s records and interviews with his closest aides.

The unprecedented circumstances that caused the Jan. 6 attack are why Biden’s directive in late 2021 to waive executive privilege was upheld by the courts. Biden repeatedly waived the privilege over documents and testimony of Trump’s close advisers, saying the national urgency of understanding the root causes of the attack outweighed the need for executive branch secrecy.

Trump argued at the time that permitting congressional investigators to pierce the secrecy of his communications — even over a subject as weighty as Jan. 6 — would lead to a cycle of retribution by future presidents. He tried to get the courts to step in and keep his White House records concealed from investigators.

“It is naïve to assume that the fallout will be limited to President Trump or the events of January 6, 2021,” Trump’s attorneys argued at the Supreme Court. “In these hyperpartisan times, Congress will increasingly and inevitably use this new weapon to perpetually harass its political rival.”

He warned that “if the privilege that covered one administration were to evaporate immediately upon the transition to the next, the privilege would be rendered all but worthless.” It would, his lawyers said, “turn executive privilege into a political weapon to be used against political enemies.”

But the courts concluded that the Jan. 6 attack was so momentous, and Congress’ need for Trump’s records so great, that executive privilege would have yielded even if Trump were the sitting president at the time.

Still, the Jan. 6 committee did not get all the testimony it wanted from Trump’s advisers. Stephen Miller refused to discuss “any conversations that he had with President Trump,” saying Trump had not waived executive privilege to permit him to testify. David Warrington, who at the time was an attorney representing Trump’s former White House personnel director, emphasized that Biden’s waiver of privilege was “pretty specific” and “not a broad waiver.” Miller is now Trump’s deputy chief of staff, and Warrington is Trump’s White House counsel.

Even witnesses willing to cooperate with the committee — like Mike Pence’s aides Marc Short and Greg Jacob, as well as Trump’s former White House counsel Pat Cipollone — refused to discuss direct conversations with Trump they said could potentially be covered by claims of executive privilege.

“We have an instruction from President Trump not to respond to questions that may implicate the privilege,” Short’s attorney Emmet Floodtold the Jan. 6 panel.

Trump’s effort, as a former president, to assert privilege over his White House records and testimony by former aides set up an unprecedented clash — no sitting president had ever diverged from the privilege claims of his predecessors. It raised unresolved questions about the degree to which former presidents retain any ability to assert privilege at all. Although the Nixon-era Supreme Court said they do, the justices also emphasized that only the incumbent president is charged with the stewardship of the executive branch and would virtually always prevail in a dispute with his predecessor.

Biden’s hands-off approach

Trump’s effort to stymie the Jan. 6 panel’s probe stands in contrast to Biden, who allies say has made no effort, so far, to instruct witnesses on how to approach the investigation into his cognitive health.

The Oversight Committee has not specifically articulated the scope of its investigation, but Comer said in a subpoena letter to O’Connor, Biden’s White House physician, that the panel is exploring legislation related to “oversight of presidents’ fitness to serve.” Republicans are also looking into making potential changes to the 25th Amendment, which gives Congress a role in determining whether a president is no longer fit to hold office — something House Democrats proposed during their probe of Trump’s actions preceding the Jan. 6 attack.

Committee Republicans have only just begun their inquiry in earnest. Comer has demanded participation from a wide range of Biden advisers — including two chiefs of staff, Ron Klain and Jeff Zients.

So far, just one witness has provided testimony: Tanden, the former staff secretary and domestic policy adviser, who fielded questions from the committee behind closed doors for hours.

Tanden has publicly indicated she answered all the committee’s questions, and a person familiar with the interview said the issue of executive privilege never came up, beyond a brief mention of Trump’s waiver at the outset.

Still, there are signs the issue may rise again.

Anthony Bernal, a former White House aide and adviser to first lady Jill Biden, withdrew from a scheduled interview after the Trump White House waived his executive privilege, leading to a subpoena from Comer that remains active.

On Tuesday, Trump’s White House issued a letter to O’Connor saying that the “unique and extraordinary nature” of the investigation into Biden’s health was reason to waive executive privilege. The letter further noted that the White House had decided that, after “balancing the Legislative and Executive Branch interests,” Congress should be able to hear O’Connor’s testimony “irrespective of potential executive privilege.”

Biden has so far not instructed aides to resist the probe on executive privilege grounds. In fact, he’s said little at all on the subject, instead leaving it to each witness to determine their own strategy. The former president has maintained he made the decisions during his presidency.

A person familiar with the Biden team’s thinking, granted anonymity to reveal confidential discussions, said there’s a key distinction between Biden’s privilege waiver for the Jan. 6 probe and Trump’s privilege waiver now. Despite Trump’s hostility toward the Jan. 6 investigation, the Biden White House engaged regularly with Trump and his team to discuss the contours of the waivers, sometimes narrowing the categories of information they made available to the committee, the person said.

Trump’s White House, on the other hand, is not engaging with the former president, the person said. Nor is the House Oversight Committee.

Asked about the role of executive privilege in the investigation, a committee spokesperson simply pointed to Trump’s waiver and said the issue isn’t being factored into its handling of topics for upcoming witnesses.

Congress

Trump apparently shares Tom Cotton’s phone number in push to make Daylight Saving Time permanent

Published

1 day ago

October 3, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

President Donald Trump appeared to share Sen. Tom Cotton’s phone number in a Saturday morning social media post imploring the Arkansas Republican to get behind a bill to make Daylight Saving Time permanent.

“Almost everybody wants “The Sunshine Protection Act” to pass, except for Tom Cotton,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “To the Great People of Arkansas, please let your Senator know it would be a GREAT Bipartisan WIN for the United States Senate, and for America, itself.”

The president has spent months personally pushing Senate Republicans to end the practice that sees Americans change their clocks twice a year, cementing more sunlight hours in the evening for all twelve months of the calendar. Cotton, whom Trump called “a friend of mine” in the Saturday post, has long argued that making daylight saving time permanent would leave children, farmers and other early risers in the dark for hours on winter mornings.

One of Trump’s key selling points on Saturday: the PGA tour.

“The PGA TOUR, as an example, needs more Daylight in the afternoon in order to finish their Tournaments,” he said, attaching a letter from PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp endorsing the bill. ”Likewise, regular Golfers, Tennis Players, Hunters and, perhaps most importantly, Farmers who want more Daylight to play or work.

A Blue Light News call to the cellphone number went to voicemail. A spokesperson for Cotton did not respond to a request for comment. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The current version of the bill was introduced in the House in January 2025 by Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla.), with Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) leading the Senate version. The legislation would make daylight saving time permanent across most of the country, ending the twice-yearly clock changes. The legislation has been stalled in the Senate since July.

The president encouraged supporters of the bill, dubbed the “The Sunshine Protection Act,” to call Cotton to “let your Senator know it would be a GREAT Bipartisan WIN for the United States Senate, and for America, itself.”

During the 2016 Republican presidential primary, he publicly gave out the personal cellphone number of then-rival Sen. Lindsey Graham after the South Carolina Republican criticized him. Trump, who came to count on Graham as a reliable Senate ally after he won the presidency, revisited the moment during Graham’s funeral in July, acknowledging that sharing the number was something he “shouldn’t have done.”

Kelsey Brugger contributed to this report.

Congress

Sanders to rally for Troy Jackson in Maine

Published

2 days ago

October 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Sen. Bernie Sanders will hit the road for Troy Jackson in Maine starting Oct. 10, the first time the progressive leader will stump for the candidate this cycle.

The Vermont independent plans to hold three rallies with Jackson, according to an itinerary shared first with Blue Light News: first in Bangor on Oct. 10th followed by Lewiston and Biddeford on Oct. 11.

The Maine swing will kick off Sanders’ travel for the final stretch of the midterms, covering ground throughout October for House and Senate candidates, POLITICO reported.

“Bernie and Troy know that working people built this country and deserve a government that fights for them,” Jackson spokesperson Dan Gottlieb told Blue Light News. “Susan Collins has had nearly 30 years to deliver, and working Mainers are still getting squeezed while she serves the billionaires and corporate interests who bankroll her campaigns. Mainers don’t need another six years of excuses.”

Sanders campaigned ahead of major wins for progressives in the primary season, speaking at more than 60 rallies since last year’s Fight the Oligarchy tour and endorsing more than 90 candidates up and down the ballot.

He’s also opening his substantial $23 million campaign war chest, POLITICO reported, and contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars toMinnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan’s Senate campaign and others including Angie Nixon in Florida and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison,

Sanders will return to Maine after initially backing Graham Platner’s campaign for Senate. Allegations reported by POLITICO ultimately led him to call on the Democratic nominee to drop out of the race.

Sanders had not formally endorsed Jackson since he clinched the nomination from Platner, though he previously backed Jackson’s initial run for governor.

Congress

Hill: Trump’s ‘lack of favorability’ creating challenging politics

Published

2 days ago

October 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

House Financial Services Chair French Hill said he has “no concerns” about winning back his Arkansas seat in the upcoming midterm elections, but the six-term House member acknowledged the political headwinds for his party.

“I consider the atmosphere a very tough political environment right now because of President [Donald] Trump’s lack of favorability at the top, and you know people are concerned about, as I say, what it’s like to live under an inflated economy the last four years,” Hill said in an interview.

Hill is in a solidly red district, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, and said he is up against a “weaker candidate this time than I’ve had in past races.” Polling in the district, however, has shown a tighter race. The two polls done this year placed Democratic challenger Chris Jones ahead of Hill by a few percentage points. Any perceived polling victory for Jones is still well within the margin of error, and one of the polls had a Democratic sponsor.

Stephannie Lane Baker, a spokesperson for Jones, said that “of all the Republicans in Congress, the chairman of the Financial Services Committee doesn’t get to dodge responsibility for this economy. He’s in trouble, and he knows it.”

Additionally, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker’s PAC, Ready for the Fight, committed more than $1 million in television ads through the next five weeks for Jones’ race in Arkansas’s 2nd District, Jordan Abudayyeh, a spokesperson for the PAC confirmed. Overall Democratic spending on advertising for the race was just over $1 million, primarily made up by contributions from the Ready for the Fight PAC, with Republicans spending almost $2.7 million on ad buys, according to AdImpact, an advertising tracking service.

Hill said he has addressed affordability concerns “head on” this Congress.

“My work on housing, my work on the Price Stability Act, my work to try to reduce waste, fraud, and abuse, and drop the federal budget deficit as a percentage of GDP,” Hill said. “All these things can contribute to a more affordable environment for people. So I’ve tried to make that a forefront of my campaign this year.”

Hill was a key architect of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, a bipartisan housing affordability bill that became law in July. The Price Stability Act, which is unlikely to become law this year, would narrow the Federal Reserve’s current dual mandate of pursuing maximum employment and price stability to focus exclusively on containing inflation.