In a letter from Gary Lawkowski, Deputy Counsel to the President, obtained by the Washington Examiner, the former White House physician was told that “extraordinary events” constituted “exceptional circumstances warranting an accommodation to Congress” in its subpoena of him.
“Trump has determined that an assertion of executive privilege is not in the national interest, and therefore is not justified, with respect to particular subjects within the purview of the House Oversight Committee. These subjects include your assessment of former President Biden’s fitness for the office of the President and your financial relationship with the Biden family,” the letter read.
Waiving the executive privilege was appropriate, Lawkowski argued, as his testimony concerned the powers of Congress.
“After balancing the Legislative and Executive Branch interests, as required under the accommodation process, it is the President’s view that this presents an exceptional situation in which the congressional need for information outweighs the Executive Branch’s interest in maintaining confidentiality, especially given the Executive Branch’s own interest in determining the validity of prior executive actions,” he wrote.
Lawkowski also said he was “not requesting that agency counsel be permitted to attend the deposition.”
O’Connor was scheduled for a congressional hearing this week. He’s seeking to postpone it to July 28 or Aug. 4.
O’Connor’s lawyer, David Schertler, wrote a letter, obtained by NBC News, to the House Oversight Committee, seeking to delay the testimony until proper accommodations could be made.
“It would be an unnecessary spectacle to require Dr. O’Connor to testify before your Committee next week without any accommodations for the well-established doctrine of doctor-patient confidentiality and to subject himself to potential criminal prosecution for contempt of Congress for doing the right thing, honoring his legal and ethical obligations to a patient,” Schertler wrote in the Saturday letter.
Schertler added that it was “alarming” that a congressional committee would subpoena a physician to testify about the treatment of an individual patient without “any regard whatsoever for the confidentiality of the physician-patient relationship.”
