Could Trump muzzle Comey? A look at executive privilege

Peter Shane, an Ohio State University professor and the co-author of a casebook on separation-of-powers law, said that executive privilege would presumably cover Mr. Trump’s conversations with Mr. Comey, but that a judge would have to balance the president’s interest in privacy against other interests, like Congress’s need for information to perform its legislative and oversight duties.

A request for a restraining order could face several other legal hurdles, Mr. Shane and other legal specialists said. For example, Mr. Trump has publicly disclosed information about his conversations with Mr. Comey, so a judge could deem Mr. Trump to have waived his ability to claim that other parts of those talks must remain secret.

Moreover, executive privilege covers communications about a president’s constitutionally assigned responsibilities, not every topic he might discuss. Lawyers for Mr. Comey or Congress could argue that conversations about any legal jeopardy that Mr. Trump or his associates faced for events before Mr. Trump took office fall outside that realm.