M.SW. Media. Welcome to Jack, the podcast about all things special counsel. This is the special

audio version of Jack Smith's volume one of his final report on the January 6th crimes committed by Donald

Trump. And I'm Alison Gill. And I'm Andy McCabe. Hey, Andy. How's it going today? Really good to be here

and good to be wrapping this up. I think it's been a great read really parsing through it and

getting the chance to kind of kick back and forth some reactions to it with you as we go. Yeah. And today, we're going to talk more about

Jack Smith's defense of the Department of Justice and the investigative process as we start on

page 116 subsection C, Mr. Trump's claims of executive privilege.

And here's how it starts.

A time-consuming investigative challenge that the office faced was Mr. Trump's broad

invocation of executive privilege to try to prevent witnesses from providing evidence on a

wide variety of topics.

Mr. Trump asserted a form of executive privilege

known as the presidential communications privilege, a special privilege belonging to presidents that the

Supreme Court has found derives from the Constitution's design of the executive branch and separation

of powers with respect to 14 executive branch officials. Mr. Trump's repeated assertion of the

presidential communications privilege as a basis to withhold evidence required extensive pre-indictment

litigation that delayed the office's receipt of important testimony and other evidence,

including testimony from senior White House staff and executive branch

officials about topics such as Mr. Trump's knowledge that he had lost the election and the

pressure campaign Mr. Trump waged against the vice president to convince him to reject legitimate

elector slates at the January 6th certification proceeding. The courts uniformly rejected Mr. Trump's privilege assertions

seeking to deny the grand jury from hearing evidence from executive branch employees.

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