DOJ opinion extends executive privilege to president’s communications with private advisers

There’s a strange, almost quantum uncertainty about executive privilege: we know it exists, but its boundaries seem to depend on who is observing—and measuring—it. The DOJ’s new opinion attempts to collapse that uncertainty into a broader field, extending the privilege from the president’s inner orbit to include “private advisors” outside government. That’s not just a legal nuance; it’s a redefinition of where the presidency ends and the outside world begins. In the weird wild of constitutional interpretation, this is like discovering that a black hole’s event horizon can stretch to include objects that were never thought to be gravitationally bound. The deeper weirdness here is the entanglement of information and power. Executive privilege is essentially a claim of informational sovereignty—a way to keep certain conversations from becoming public. By extending it to private advisers, the memo suggests that the president’s confidentiality can wrap around people who hold no official office, no security clearance, no formal accountability. That raises a cosmic question: if a president consults a private citizen under a cloak of privilege, who exactly is governing? The answer, under this reading, might be “the president and his chosen constellation of shadow advisors,” which makes the separation of powers look less like a machine and more like a living organism with permeable membranes. Of course, this isn't physics; it's politics, and the interpretation is likely to be contested. But the pattern is familiar to anyone who studies complex systems: definitions shift, boundaries blur, and the rules of the game are rewritten by the players in power. The Hill’s coverage notes that the opinion isn’t binding on courts, but it signals an aggressive expansion of executive authority—one that could reshape how Congress investigates the presidency. It’s a reminder that legal doctrines, like cosmological models, are only as stable as the observations that support them. And right now, the observations are coming from a telescope pointed very specifically at the White House. What makes this story so wonderfully unsettling is its ordinariness. It’s not a scandal; it’s a memo. But memos are how the universe of governance actually changes—not through dramatic collisions, but through tiny shifts in interpretation that accumulate into new realities. This one invites us to ask: What is a “private adviser” anyway? Is it anyone the president happens to call? A golf partner? A media mogul? The ambiguity is the point. In the weird wild of executive power, ambiguity is a resource, and this memo is a claim to that resource. Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6022381-doj-executive-privilege-outside-advisers/