Speaker 1: They broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys.

Speaker 2: President Trump and his lawyer Michael Cohen's legal woes have brought the issue of attorney-client privilege into the spotlight.

Speaker 1: It's a disgraceful situation.

Speaker 2: But what exactly is this common-law protection, and who does it apply to?

Speaker 3: Attorney-client privilege is a legal doctrine that protects from disclosure confidential communications between a lawyer and a client, connected with legal advice. So it protects from compelled disclosure, the information a client gives a lawyer in order to get that advice, and the advice that the lawyer gives the client. And it is an evidentiary privilege. So no one is allowed to put into evidence those communications. In order for the attorney-client privilege to apply, there has to be an attorney-client relationship.

Speaker 4: You want attorney-client privilege, don't you? So that everything you say is strictly between us. I mean it. Put a dollar in my pocket. Come on, make it official.

Speaker 3: As a legal matter, it doesn't necessarily matter whether the client paid the lawyer or anything. That can be an indication, that can be evidence of a lawyer-client relationship,

Speaker 2: but it's not necessary. The privilege has been around for centuries, designed in order to encourage clients and their lawyers to be candid with each other. But there have been exceptions and developments carved out over time.

Speaker 3: The Supreme Court has indicated that it's the oldest privilege that we have. It's hundreds of years old. There are developments over time, particularly with regard to one exception to the privilege. It's called the crime-fraud exception. What the crime-fraud exception says is that if a client is using a lawyer's services to commit a crime or a fraud, then the privilege does not apply to those communications. If a crime-fraud exception applies, it doesn't actually mean that the lawyer has engaged in any wrongdoing. That might be the case, but it might not be the case. And there are also developments regarding how the privilege applies in corporations or organizations. Corporations can claim the attorney-client privilege. There are different rules of thumb about how broadly a corporation, say, the Trump Organization, can assert the privilege.

Speaker 2: It's far from the first time that this privilege has risen into the limelight in the midst of a political scandal. The days of Watergate and Whitewater helped reshape how the privilege is interpreted for corporations and how it applies to the government.

Speaker 3: A significant number of the major court cases involving attorney-client privilege have also involved major political scandals. During the Whitewater investigation of Bill Clinton, a couple of different courts of appeals here in D.C. and also the Eighth Circuit ruled that the attorney-client privilege for the government has to give way to a criminal investigation.

Speaker 2: But even though the government's claim of attorney-client privilege is weakened during a criminal investigation, Trump's insistence that attorney-client privilege is dead is an overstatement, according to Clark.

Speaker 3: I wouldn't say there's any trend toward the attorney-client privilege decreasing or disappearing. What may be decreasing is the president's confidence that the information that Michael Cohen has is not subject to protection. So the president may have misunderstood the scope of the attorney-client privilege.