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The agents in Arizona lost track of several hundred weapons in Operation Fast and Furious. The low point of the operation came in Arizona in 2010, when Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was killed in a firefight with a group of armed Mexican bandits and two guns traced to the operation were found at the scene. Issa, in his letter to the president, wrote, "Courts have consistently held that the assertion of the constitutionally-based executive privilege ... is only applicable ... to documents and communications that implicate the confidentiality of the president's decision-making process." The letter said that while the privilege covers only the president and his advisers, it is a qualified privilege that can be overcome by a showing of the committee's need for the documents. Shane, the Ohio State professor, said: "Executive privilege is really an umbrella concept that encompasses a variety of privileges. History's most famous claim of executive privilege
-- President Richard Nixon's unsuccessful attempt to withhold the Watergate tapes
-- was an example of `presidential privacy privilege.' That privilege covers executive communications when the president is involved." He said the executive branch historically claims a much broader privilege, the so-called deliberative privilege. That claim tries to protect documents generated anywhere in the executive branch that embody only the executive's internal deliberations, not final policy decisions. The current dispute involves deliberative privilege, he said. Issa quoted from a 1997 case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in which the court said the privilege should not extend to staff outside the White House in executive branch agencies. Rather, the court said, it should apply only to "communications authored or solicited and received by those members of an immediate White House adviser's staff" with responsibility for formulating advice for the president. President George W. Bush invoked executive privilege for the first time in his administration to block a congressional committee trying to review documents about a decades-long scandal involving FBI misuse of mob informants in Boston.
[Associated
Press;
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