Trump may block Comey testimony before Senate

"Courts have ruled that government misconduct is an exception to the doctrine of executive privilege", he said.

Andrew Wright, an associate professor at the Savannah Law School in Georgia who served as associate counsel to former president Barack Obama, said executive privilege was created to allow a president to keep an aide's advice confidential or protect national security.

Sen. Roy Blunt, a member of the intelligence committee, said Comey's testimony would be critical to address mounting questions about possible obstruction of justice.

Legal experts told The Times that Trump does not have a strong case to invoke the privilege due to his public acknowledgement of his conversations with Comey.

He said he had not spoken to the White House counsel, Don McGahn, about the matter.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer disputed Comey's account of the president's remarks, saying it "is not an accurate representation of that meeting". "It would be odd if he could then invoke privilege to block Comey from giving his version of events", Feldman told Bloomberg.

And throughout the first few months of his presidency, that didn't change much. President Barack Obama asserted the privilege in 2012 to block Congress from seeing documents relating to an investigation into Fast and Furious, a botched gunrunning operation conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The initial decision to fire Comey presented similar concerns and pitfalls for the administration as the current decision whether or not to try to halt his testimony does.

Trump's plan looks to make good on a campaign promise, but is also a clear attempt to offer a distraction - albeit a less controversial one - to what Comey is expected to say when he testifies in an open Senate hearing on Thursday.

Comey associates have alleged that Trump asked the FBI director if he could drop an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn and his Russian contacts.

The remarks were the latest in a series of denials from Moscow that have had little impact so far on a political crisis in the United States over potential links between Russian Federation and Trump's inner circle.

But later on Friday, two senior administration officials told The New York Times that Trump likely will not try to hinder Comey from testifying.

"In the context of a criminal investigation, executive privilege has to give way", said Saikrishna Prakash, who lectures on constitutional law and the separation of powers at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Putin also told NBC that regardless of Trump's previous travel to Russian Federation as a businessman, he had had no relationship with him and had never met him. Comey is now a private citizen who does not have to worry about losing his job if he does not comply. The idea, Republicans said, is to choke off the Democratic congressional minorities from gaining new information that could be used to attack the president...

But there are instances of executive privilege being challenged in court.

"But violating executive privilege isn't a crime". Comey is no longer under the control of the executive branch, Whittington said, which is why "the executive branch has no capacity to withhold him from Congress". Has the White House cooperated? "His testimony is in the public's interest".