Teacher:In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Teacher: Now, understand the problem? Solve this instance: President Obama’s decision Wednesday to assert executive privilege to shield his attorney general and the Justice Department from congressional investigators reignited a long-running Washington debate over the limits of White House power in which Obama has argued both sides. 
  
 In 2007, Obama, then a senator with higher ambitions, chided President George W. Bush for employing his executive authority to block then-senior White House adviser Karl Rove from testifying before Congress in a scandal involving the firing of nine U.S. attorneys. 
  
 Speaking to CNN host Larry King, Obama declared that the Bush administration had a tendency to “hide behind executive privilege every time there’s something a little shaky that’s taking place.” 
  
 Obama urged Bush to consider “coming clean,” adding that “the American people deserve to know what was going on there.” 
  
 On Wednesday, his role had changed, but the debate was the same: Republican were asking what exactly Obama was trying to hide by invoking his right to executive privilege for the first time. The administration is refusing to turn over documents related to the Justice Department’s “Fast and Furious” operation, which involved the flow of illegal guns to Mexico. A House committee on Wednesday voted to find Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over the documents. 
  
 The answers to his critics’ questions could have broad implications for Obama five months before voters decide whether to grant him a second term. The expected protracted legal dispute has the potential to embarrass and distract the White House during the heart of the reelection campaign. Obama’s assertion of privilege quickly became fodder for his political opponents, who have latched onto the Fast and Furious scandal to accuse the president of trying to avoid congressional scrutiny. 
  
 Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), a senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Obama on Wednesday asking for more detail on the exact scope of the privilege that Obama invoked. 
  
 Administration officials dismissed suggestions that the president's action contradicted the position Obama held as a presidential candidate in 2007. They noted the administration already has handed over 7,600 documents to Congress and Holder has testified nine times. 
  
 The documents in dispute are “deliberative process” memos that have traditionally been protected by Democratic and Republican administrations so that the White House staff can freely discuss sensitive matters without being influenced by the fear that their internal debates will be made public, administration officials said. 
  
 White House spokesman Eric Schultz noted that Obama has shown greater reluctance to use executive privilege than his two immediate predecessors. Bush invoked the power six times and Bill Clinton 14, according to the Congressional Research Service. 
  
 But Mark Rozell, a public policy professor at George Mason University who has testified before Congress on executive privilege, said the question is not how many times the power is invoked but whether there is a legal justification. 
  
 The Constitution does not mention executive privilege, said Rozell, who noted that courts have typically ruled that it applies in cases of vital national security interests. 
  
 That might be the legal definition, but the political calculus for the White House is whether what Obama is seeking to keep private is more damaging to him than failing to publicly disclose the documents. 
  
 “Every time a president claims executive privilege, it brings up memories of President Nixon’s abuses of that doctrine,” Rozell said. 
  
 Not all claims of executive privilege hold legal water. Some of President Bill Clinton’s attempts to invoke privilege during grand jury hearings into his relationship with Monica Lewinsky were withdrawn or rejected in court. 
  
 Rove eventually did testify on the firing of the U.S. attorneys, meeting with congressional leaders behind closed doors in 2009 — after Bush had left office. 
  
 Scott Coffina, a Bush administration counsel who is now in private practice, emphasized the need to safeguard “unvarnished” legal advice on policy matters. 
  
 But he acknowledged that the documents in dispute could contain “significant information” that may explain why Holder reversed himself and declared the Fast and Furious program “fundamentally flawed” after initially standing by it. ||||| Shannen W. Coffin June 20, 2012 2:29 PM by 
  
 Put aside the obvious charge that President Obama is now embracing the powers of the presidency that he once railed against, and let’s look at the actual invocation of executive privilege in the Fast and Furious matter. Executive privilege comes in at least two forms — the first, and strongest, form of privilege is the “presidential communications” privilege, which, as its name suggests, deals with direct communications with the president (or his closest advisers who are communicating on his behalf, such as gathering information to convey advice to the president). Here, there is no claim that any of the communications at issue involved or even related to the president, so the president does not invoke the presidential communications privilege. 
  
 Instead, the president invokes the second, more common, form of “executive privilege,” the so-called “deliberative process” privilege. This is a qualified privilege and protects pre-decisional communications within the executive branch. The theory behind the privilege is that government decision-makers should not live in a fishbowl, and that candid, and sometimes unpopular, advice may be needed to make the best decisions. Exposing those decisions to the scrutiny that public document dumps entails (think how much you’d enjoy your entire e-mail outbox on the front page of the New York Times) would necessarily chill internal deliberations and result in less effective government decision-making. 
  
 Here, the president (on the request and advice of the attorney general) concluded that the deliberative process privilege applied to purely internal Department of Justice deliberations regarding how the department should respond to both congressional inquiries and media inquiries. None of those deliberations were proximate to the White House or the president — but entailed only DOJ employees in the ordinary course of their jobs (and we don’t know how high up in DOJ those deliberations went, so we don’t know if the attorney general himself was involved). 
  
 Notwithstanding the lack of proximity to the president, there is a reasonable basis for invoking the privilege with respect to pre-decisional communications involving how the Justice Department should respond to congressional inquiries. There would be separation-of-powers problems if Congress could readily peel back the curtain from any executive-branch agency to see which agency employee said what to whom about any question that a congressional committee might pose to the agency. But media inquiries? The Department’s Office of Public affairs plays an important function, but is it so important that the process by which it decides to answer a blogger’s question should be the matter of a presidential invocation of privilege? Holder provides no real support for that proposition in his letter to the president, and it seems unlikely that a court would find a significant executive interest in such everyday and relatively mundane decisions. 
  
 #more#Saying that the invocation of privilege is reasonable as to a particular category of communications is not the same as saying that the privilege should be upheld. As noted, the deliberative-process privilege is a qualified one, and it gives way to a substantial need by a coordinate branch of government. Thus, it stands little chance of surviving in the context of, say, a criminal trial or an impeachment proceeding. Where allegations of wrongdoing are at issue, the qualified deliberative-process privilege is not much of a hurdle to compelled disclosure. 
  
 Here, Congress does have a legitimate legislative interest in the Fast and Furious inquiry. While Congress lacks a pure “oversight” function — a point many of its members fail to understand — it can make inquiries of the executive branch as part of an investigation in exercise of its lawmaking authority. Thus, if Congress is considering what legal changes need to be made with respect to gunwalking in DOJ/FBI/ATF investigations, the legislative “need” is strong. Also, and perhaps unspoken in this context, Congressman Issa may be making an inquiry about wrongful conduct at DOJ as a basis for making a referral on impeachment of the Attorney General. If the committee were to invoke such an interest, deliberative process would give way rather readily. 
  
 Holder claims here that Congress doesn’t have an interest in inquiring about how DOJ responds to congressional inquiries, as that function doesn’t relate to lawmaking at all but to policing how an agency deals with Congress. But that seems to give short shrift to the overall lawmaking nature of the inquiry here. Congress could have an interest in these particular documents because they might include information relevant to the underlying legislative inquiry about Fast and Furious — and further the lawmaking function. So if the House were eventually to sue to enforce the subpoena, it seems likely that this particular invocation of privilege would fail the need test. 
  
 What’s next? A House Government Reform Committee vote, followed by a full House vote, then a referral to the U.S. attorney, who will decline to prosecute contempt because of the privilege invocation (or the House may simply bypass that step, given its frivolousness). Failing a criminal prosecution for contempt, if Issa and company remain resolute, a House civil suit to enforce the subpoena will follow, as happened in the Rove/Miers contempt situation. 
  
 On the political side, one thing now is clear. Fast and Furious is owned, lock, stock and barrel, by the president. No longer is this a merely DOJ problem. The president’s invocation of his privilege makes the problem his own. ||||| President Obama escalated a battle between his administration and the Republican House over Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday in ways that could benefit his reelection campaign. 
  
 By asserting executive privilege over “Fast and Furious” documents sought by the House GOP, Obama inserted himself directly into the fight between Holder and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman. He also made it easier to run against not only Mitt Romney, but a Republican House he hopes to portray as divisive and overly extreme. 
  
 ADVERTISEMENT 
  
 The move enabled the White House to shift the story surrounding the controversial gun-tracking operation and to scold Republicans — under an increasingly bright public spotlight — for focusing on what the administration dubs a political witch hunt instead of passing federal transportation funding and extending low interest rates on federally backed student loans. 
  
 “If you had to find one person who is the most over-the-top in terms of partisanship, you would select Darrell Issa,” said Lanny Davis, who served as a special counsel to President Clinton (and who writes a column for The Hill). 
  
 He predicted that the fight against Issa will be “quite helpful” to Obama, who is expected to deliver remarks on Thursday urging Congress to pass legislation that would prevent student loan interest rates from doubling. 
  
 “I think Democrats are joyful that he is the face of the party they’re running against,” he said. 
  
 Yet the assertion of executive privilege by the White House is also a risk for Obama. 
  
 It brings the president closer to the Fast and Furious scandal and directly connects Obama to Holder, seen by some as a controversial figure in the administration. It also allowed Republicans on Wednesday to suggest a deeper cover-up. 
  
 “It’s a terrible error,” said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican consultant. “It now links Obama directly to Holder in a way that hasn’t been done so far. The White House up until this point had done a pretty good job of staying away from the Justice Department on this issue.” 
  
 Obama is ratcheting the matter up “to a whole new level,” Mackowiak said. 
  
 “It’s moving away from just a Washington story to one that will be on the front pages and the network evening newscasts,” he said. “The White House has basically put all their chips on the table and have said, ‘Come and get it.’ ” 
  
 Republican strategists and consultants say the move to help Holder is part of a larger plan by Team Obama to move off the message of the struggling economy. They point to Wednesday’s decision and Obama’s aggressive order late last week — to halt deportation of young immigrants who were brought into the country illegally — as proof. 
  
 “It really seems as if the Obama campaign and the Obama administration have been flailing for the past three or four weeks, going in multiple directions off message, and they have allowed these issues to mushroom to the point where the public will have to take notice,” said Republican strategist Keith Appell. “People still like President Obama, but if he starts invoking Watergate-era policies that fly in the face [of] his commitment to transparency, and if he starts rewiring the laws on issues like immigration, then that starts to make him look like he’s desperate and in way over his head.” 
  
 Running against Congress, Appell continued, is “a severely flawed strategy, because Democrats control half of Congress.” 
  
 As the fight between Holder and Issa escalated in recent months, the White House maintained it had done everything possible to accommodate congressional investigators, producing more than 7,600 pages of documents and testifying at 11 hearings on Capitol Hill. The administration argues that Republicans have pursued a fight that is “purely political.” 
  
 White House aides, who carefully weighed the risk of injecting Obama into the debate, said Congress should be focused on improving a down economy. 
  
 “With millions of Americans still struggling to pay the bills, Republicans announced at the beginning of this year that one of their top priorities was to investigate the administration and damage the president politically,” White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer said in an email Wednesday. 
  
 “Instead of creating jobs or strengthening the middle class, congressional Republicans are spending time on a politically motivated, taxpayer-funded election-year fishing expedition,” he said. 
  
  
  
  |||||
Student:
President Obama's decision to invoke executive privilege for the first time in his administration is a bold but risky move in an election year, pundits say. Here's a look at what he's up against now: Most administrations assert executive privilege at some point, but Obama has started what will probably be a long, embarrassing, and distracting fight just five months before the election, notes David Nakamura at the Washington Post. Obama's opponents have been quick to remind him of his earlier stance on executive privilege, when he said the Bush administration hid behind it "every time there’s something a little shaky that’s taking place." Entering the battle between the House GOP and Attorney General Eric Holder will make it easier for Obama to paint House Republicans as divisive and extreme, write Amie Parnes at the Hill, but the move also brings him "closer to the Fast and Furious scandal, and directly connects Obama to Holder, seen by some as a controversial figure in the administration." Obama's assertion of executive privilege may or may not hold up if the House decides to sue, but "one thing now is clear," writes Shannen Coffin at the National Review. "Fast and Furious is owned, lock, stock and barrel, by the president. No longer is this a merely DOJ problem." The move is part of just another "pointless partisan fight," decides the New York Times. The Justice Department could have worked out a deal with the House committee pursuing Holder, but "instead, they show again that every issue, large or small, can be turned into ammunition for political combat."