How about Ted Kennedy’s privacy

Sen. Teddy Kennedy has demanded that the Bush administration waive attorney-client privilege and release internal memos John Roberts worked on while in the solicitor general’s office 15 years ago, all of which were supposed to be held in the deepest confidence. Apparently, Kennedy thinks public officials have no right to keep even their attorney-client communications secret.

This surprised me because the senator is such a strong advocate of the (nonexistent) “right to privacy.” And not just in the way most drunken, Spanish quiz-cheating, no-pants-wearing public reprobates generally cherish their own personal right to privacy. I mean privacy in the abstract.

I know as much about the “right to privacy” as I know about any other made-up, nonexistent right, but I would have thought that any “right to privacy” would protect confidential attorney-client conversations at least as much as, say, abortions in public buildings.

But I’ll have to defer to the expert.

Consequently, applying the principle even-handedly to members of the executive branch as well as the legislative branch, I demand that Kennedy immediately waive all attorney-client privilege relating to his communications with his lawyer after he drove Mary Jo Kopechne off the bridge at Chappaquiddick. It’s time to clear up, once and for all, the many questions that have swirled around Kennedy since Chappaquiddick.

Oops — “swirled” may have been a poor choice of words there. How about “floated”? Nope. “Surfaced”? Oooh — even worse, in terms of irony. “Come to light”? OK, now I’m just being obtuse. “Beset”? Yes, that’s better.

Youth is no defense. John Roberts was 26 years old when he wrote the documents that Kennedy demands on behalf of the Senate. Kennedy was 36 when he drove Mary Jo Kopechne off a bridge.

If the Senate needs to know what Roberts thought about the law at age 26, then the Senate certainly needs to know what Kennedy thought about the law at age 36, when he drowned a girl and then spent the rest of the evening concocting an alibi instead of calling the police.

This isn’t a “rehash” of Chappaquiddick; it’s never been hashed. The Senate needs to know whether Kennedy was guilty of manslaughter. How else can the Senate be expected to carry out its constitutional duty to expel Kennedy unless Kennedy makes these key documents available?

We’ll pick them up in the same van we send to collect John Kerry’s military records and Bill Clinton’s medical records.

While we wait, here’s my guess as to what those attorney-client conversations sounded like, based on the facts in Leo Damore’s book “Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up”:

Interview with client Teddy Kennedy, July 19, 1969:

Teddy: May I approach the bench?

Teddy: We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Hey, what’s so funny? Did I just say something funny?

To be continued …

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Ann Coulter

One of the first columnists who agreed to have her columns posted at PTBC (and did so for ten years), Ann Coulter is a lawyer, columnist, speaker, and author of 13 huge New York Times best sellers (as an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. These are paid links):

• High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (1998)
• Slander:Liberal Lies About the American Right (2002)
• Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism (2003)
• HowTo Talk To Liberals (If You Must) (2004)
• Godless: The Church of Liberalism (2006)
• If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans (2007)
• Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America (2009)
• Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America (2011)
•Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama (2012)
•Never Trust a Liberal Over Three-Especially a Republican (2013)
•Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole (2015)
•In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! (2016)
•Resistance Is Futile!: How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind (2018)

She also writes a popular syndicated column every week published at Breitbart, DailyCaller, Townhall, FrontPage, Yahoo, Takimag, VDare, and dozens of newspapers. (As well as the eponymous, AnnCoulter.com!)

Coulter has been a major media personality for more than 20 years, after starting on MSNBC their first day on air in July 1996.

She has appeared on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, PBS’s Frontline, The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Early Show, The Tonight Show, Good Morning Britain, Yahoo News, and a slew of other U.S. and international TV shows. She was the cover story of Time magazine on April 25, 2005, and has been profiled in scores of other publications, including TV Guide, The Guardian (UK), the New York Observer, National Journal, Harper’s Bazaar, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Elle magazine. In 2001, Coulter was named one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner.

A Connecticut native, Coulter graduated with honors from Cornell University School of Arts & Sciences and received her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School, where she was an editor of The Michigan Law Review.

After practicing law for a few, very long years in New York City, Coulter moved to Washington to work for the Senate Judiciary Committee, where she handled crime and immigration issues for Senator Spencer Abraham of Michigan. From there, she became a litigator with the Center For Individual Rights in Washington, DC, focusing on free speech, congressional power, and race discrimination cases.

Within a year, Coulter took a short leave of absence from her law firm to write her first New York Times bestseller, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton.

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