This is the Libertarian Podcasts from the Hoover Institution.

I'm your host Tom Church, and the Libertarian is Professor Richard Epstein.

Richard is the Peter and Kirsten Bedford senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution.

He's a Lawrence A Tish professor of law at NYU and he's a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago.

And this week has been an eventful one surrounding the House Select Committee on the January 6th attack on the Capitol.

For some context here, after Senate Republicans filibustered a bicameral commission, we ended up with the select House committee created on partisan lines.

Only two Republicans voted for it, Representatives Cheney and Kinziger, both who serve on the committee.

And the latest news, Richard, is a lawsuit

filed on behalf of former President Trump,

who was seeking to block the National Archives

from turning over records from his time in office surrounding during the attack.

Can you give us a primer before we go further on how executive privilege works in this case

and some background on any former Supreme Court cases that might indicate how this will be resolved.

Well, I could give you a primer, but I don't think it's going to have the requisite clarity to resolve this particular case.

The first and simplest point to say is like all doctrines of

privilege there's no explicit reference to it anywhere in the Constitution yet

everybody believes that it essentially has serious constitutional origins.

And so the kind of implication that you have

is if it turns out that the Congress can subpoena

and can punish the president for his refusal

to do business with them.

Essentially what happens is it's a dangerous attack on the

...