Tony Snow: Executive privilege now Vs then

Tony Snow Backs 'Executive Privilege' Now -- But Hit It Back in Clinton Era

By E&P Staff

Published: March 21, 2007 10:55 AM ET

NEW YORK With the crisis over the firing of eight U.S. attorneys mounting, President Bush and his spokesman Tony Snow have roundly embraced the concept of "executive privilege" to deny Congress and testimony and documents from key White House insiders. But Snow was singing a different tune during the Clinton era, when a president claimed the same during the Lewinsky scandal.

Glenn Greenwald, who now blogs for Salon, has located a Snow column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch from March 29, 1998, back in his days as a newspaper pundit. Snow wrote then:

"Evidently, Mr. Clinton wants to shield virtually any communications that take place within the White House compound on the theory that all such talk contributes in some way, shape or form to the continuing success and harmony of an administration. Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for anything. He would have a constitutional right to cover up.

"Chances are that the courts will hurl such a claim out, but it will take time.

"One gets the impression that Team Clinton values its survival more than most people want justice and thus will delay without qualm. But as the clock ticks, the public's faith in Mr. Clinton will ebb away for a simple reason: Most of us want no part of a president who is cynical enough to use the majesty of his office to evade the one thing he is sworn to uphold -- the rule of law."

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003560724

Tony Snow says president must let his senior advisers testify under oath

The problem is that Snow said this ten years ago, about Bill Clinton. The Chicago Trib's blog has Snow's entire article he wrote about Clinton

http://americablog.blogspot.com/2007/03/tony-snow-says-president-must-let-his.html

One of those statements are correct and the other is not. They both can not be correct. Unless of course the Bush* Administration is more Privileged than any other Administration. Is that what he is now saying?