Unmitigated gall

 The White House is claiming that it has the right to screen the emails on RNC computers before they are handed to Congress:

[T]oday, in a letter to the RNC, the White House made their position clear: you have to give them to us first. There "exists a clear and indisputable Executive Branch interest" in the emails on the RNC-issued accounts, wrote Emmet Flood, Special Counsel to the President.

There is an one obvious and one not so obvious flaw in the "reasoning" behind this claim of executive privilege.

The obvious flaw is that, by definition, email on an RNC server is not properly Executive Branch business. Any executive branch business on those emails is not just evidence of a crime, it is a crime, since it violates the Hatch Act. 

Less obvious is the incredible extent to which the White House is trying to stretch the concept of executive privilege. Nixon tried to use it to shield the plotting that took place in the Oval Office, but to the best of my knowledge and recollection, he never tried to stretch it to include all communications between executive branch employees. How far down, one must wonder, does this go? Can he claim executive privilege for emails between any two federal employees?

It is an unfortunate fact that both Congress and the courts are slow moving institutions. The executive is light on its feet, by design. Almost any lawyer can tell you that it's ever so easy for an unprincipled litigant to gum up the court system for years. The courts simply don't know how to deal with people who don't have a fundamental respect for playing by the rules. Still, sooner or later (unless our courts have truly been totally corrupted, in which case all is lost) the mills of the courts, like those of the gods, grind exceeding small. Congress has only two tools at its disposal: public opinion and the courts. It should get in to a court with this issue right now.