Since the FBI seized the files of the president's personal attorney, legal experts have been stepping up by the dozens to show us that the president's announcement of the death of the attorney-client privilege was premature, and that—thankfully in a system that prides itself in the rights afforded defendants—this basic due-process safeguard is alive and well. Even Kellyanne Conway's husband, a well-known Big Law litigator, got into the act, citing Justice Department policy respectful of the privilege:

Because of the potential effects of [the seizure of a lawyer's files] on legitimate attorney-client relationships and because of the possibility that, during such a search, the government may encounter material protected by a legitimate claim of privilege, it is important that close control be exercised over this type of search.

Normally, if President Donald Trump ever got anything right—even Halley's comet passes along every 70-some years—I might very well not, out of sheer anger, concede it. The following statement then, based on the importance of the topic, is an exception: While the attorney-client privilege is by no means dead, it lies wounded—hidden in plain view, as it were—in modern practice. Although for an entirely wrong reason, the president wasn't too far away from being right about the present condition of the privilege.