Executive privilege is the right of the president of the United States and other members of the executive branch to maintain confidential communications under certain circumstances within the executive branch and to resist some subpoenas and other oversight by the legislative and judicial branches of government in pursuit of particular information or personnel relating to those confidential communications. The right comes into effect when revealing the information would impair governmental functions. Neither executive privilege nor the oversight power of Congress is explicitly mentioned in the United States Constitution. However, the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that executive privilege and congressional oversight each are a consequence of the doctrine of the separation of powers, derived from the supremacy of each branch in its area of constitutional activity.
Valerie Elise Plame is an American writer, spy novelist, and former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer. As the subject of the 2003 Plame affair, also known as the CIA leak scandal, Plame's identity as a CIA officer was leaked to and subsequently published by Robert Novak of The Washington Post. She described this period and the media firestorm that ensued as "mortifying, and I think I was in shock for a couple years".
Contempt of Congress is the act of obstructing the work of the United States Congress or one of its committees. Historically, the bribery of a U.S. senator or U.S. representative was considered contempt of Congress. In modern times, contempt of Congress has generally applied to the refusal to comply with a subpoena issued by a congressional committee or subcommittee—usually seeking to compel either testimony or the production of requested documents.
Fred Fisher Fielding is an American lawyer. He held the office of White House Counsel for US Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush in addition to serving as an Associate and Deputy White House Counsel for Richard Nixon under John Dean. Fielding was also of counsel to the presidential transition of Donald Trump and a member of the 9/11 Commission. An alumnus of Gettysburg College, he is the namesake of that school's Fielding Center for Presidential Leadership Study.
Robert Jones Portman is an American attorney and politician who served as a United States senator from Ohio from 2011 to 2023. A member of the Republican Party, Portman was the 35th director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from 2006 to 2007, the 14th United States trade representative from 2005 to 2006, and a U.S. representative from 1993 to 2005, representing Ohio's 2nd district.
The 97th United States Congress was a meeting of the legislative branch of the United States federal government, composed of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives. It met in Washington, D.C., from January 3, 1981, to January 3, 1983, during the final weeks of Jimmy Carter's presidency and the first two years of Ronald Reagan's presidency. The apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives was based on the 1970 United States census.
John Michael Luttig is an American corporate lawyer and jurist who served as a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006. Luttig resigned his judicial appointment in 2006 to become the general counsel of Boeing, a position he held until 2019.
Leonard Anthony Leo is an American lawyer and conservative legal activist. He was the longtime vice president of the Federalist Society and is currently, along with Steven Calabresi, the co-chairman of the organization's board of directors. Leo has been instrumental in building a network of influential conservative legal groups funded mostly by anonymous donors, including The 85 Fund and Concord Fund, which serve as funding hubs for affiliated political nonprofits. He assisted Clarence Thomas in his Supreme Court confirmation hearings and led campaigns to support the nominations of John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
Patrick F. Philbin is an American lawyer who served as Deputy Counsel to the President and Deputy Assistant to the President in the Office of White House Counsel in the Donald J. Trump administration. He previously served in the Department of Justice during the George W. Bush administration.
Virginia "Ginni" Thomas is an American attorney and conservative activist. In 1987, she married Clarence Thomas, who became an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1991. Her conservative commentary and activism have made her a controversial figure, especially because spouses of Supreme Court justices typically avoid politics.
John Charles Eastman is an American lawyer and former academic who has been criminally indicted for assisting then-President Donald Trump's efforts to maintain the presidency and prevent its transition to Joe Biden after the 2020 U.S. presidential election. He is the founding director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, a public-interest law firm affiliated with the Claremont Institute, a conservative think tank. He is a former professor and former dean at Chapman University School of Law. He ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for California's 34th congressional district in 1990, and for California Attorney General in 2010. He is a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Eastman has been criminally indicted in Georgia and is facing disbarment proceedings in California for his role in assisting then-president Donald Trump's attempts to undo the 2020 election results, including by pressuring vice president Mike Pence to reject the votes of electors from crucial swing states that Biden won while certifying the 2020 United States presidential election. He is also suspected of being a co-conspirator in the federal indictment of Donald Trump.
Clarence Thomas is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President George H. W. Bush to succeed Thurgood Marshall and has served since 1991. After Marshall, Thomas is the second African American to serve on the Supreme Court and has been its longest-serving member since Anthony Kennedy's retirement in 2018. Since Stephen Breyer's retirement in 2022, he is also the Court's oldest member.
Powers of the United States Congress are implemented by the United States Constitution, defined by rulings of the Supreme Court, and by its own efforts and by other factors such as history and custom. It is the chief legislative body of the United States. Some powers are explicitly defined by the Constitution and are called enumerated powers; others have been assumed to exist and are called implied powers.
Susan Lynn Brooks is an American prosecutor and politician. She is a Republican and the former U.S. Representative for Indiana's 5th congressional district. She was elected in 2012. The district includes the northern fifth of Indianapolis, as well as many of the city's affluent northern and eastern suburbs. Brooks served as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Indiana from 2001 to 2007.
The inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States marked the commencement of Donald Trump's term as president and Mike Pence's term as vice president. An estimated 300,000 to 600,000 people attended the public ceremony held on Friday, January 20, 2017, at the West Front of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Rachel Lee Brand is an American lawyer, academic, and former government official. She served as the United States Associate Attorney General from May 22, 2017, until February 20, 2018, when she resigned to take a job as head of global corporate governance at Walmart. Brand was the first woman to serve as Associate Attorney General. She also served as Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy in the George W. Bush administration and was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. Prior to becoming Associate Attorney General, Brand was an associate professor at Antonin Scalia Law School.
The United States House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol was a bipartisan select committee of the U.S. House of Representatives established to investigate the U.S. Capitol attack.
The Eastman memos, also known as the "coup memo", are documents by John Eastman, an American law professor retained by then-President Donald Trump advancing the fringe legal theory that a U.S. Vice President has unilateral authority to reject certified State electors. This would have the effect of nullifying an election in order to produce an outcome personally desired by the Vice President, such as a result in the Vice President's own party's favor, including retaining himself as Vice President, or if the Vice President is himself the presidential candidate, then to unilaterally make himself president.
Following the results of the 2020 United States presidential election, an obstruction scheme was devised by 45th U.S. president Donald Trump and his allies in seven key swing states to create and submit fraudulent certificates of ascertainment that falsely asserted Trump had won the electoral college vote in those states. The intent of the scheme was to pass the fraudulent certificates to then-vice president Mike Pence in the hope he would count them, rather than the authentic certificates, and thus overturn Joe Biden's victory. This effort was predicated on a fringe legal theory outlined by Trump attorney John Eastman in the Eastman memos, which claimed the vice president has constitutional discretion to swap official electors with an alternate slate during the certification process, thus changing the outcome of the electoral college vote and the overall winner of the presidential race. This scheme infamously came to be known as the Pence Card.
Between November 2022 and January 2023, approximately 25 to 30 classified government documents were discovered by President Joe Biden's attorneys in his former office at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., and in his personal residence in Wilmington, Delaware, dating to his time in the Senate and his vice presidency in the Obama administration.
