In a major blow to the Trump Administration, a panel of three federal judges on Thursday unanimously denied the federal government’s efforts to reinstate the president’s travel ban and rejected a Justice Department argument that it violates the separation of powers for judges to “entertain a constitutional challenge to executive actions such as this one.”

The 29-page order leaves in place for now an order issued last Friday by a Seattle judge that halted the president’s travel ban on people arriving from seven Muslim-majority nations. It allows the federal government to seek review of the panel’s decision by a larger panel of judges from the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit.

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“It’s theoretical, but if the 9th Circuit affirms the order on the ground that the subjective motivations of the president are legally relevant, then they’re going to need to find some way to prove what those subjective motivations were,” said professor Michael W. McConnell, the director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, himself a former federal appellate judge on the 10th Circuit. “The president will refuse to testify, and he will refuse to release any documents, and he has executive privilege.”

McConnell, speaking before the 9th Circuit order was issued, predicted a standoff would ensue between Trump and Robart, and that Trump “is going to be on extraordinarily strong legal ground because executive privilege is always thought to apply to national security.”

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McConnell, the Stanford professor, said the “leading precedent” that might control a discovery motion against Trump would be the Watergate case in which U.S. District Judge John Sirica ordered President Richard M. Nixon to turn over the secret tapes he maintained of his Oval Office conversations. The case was taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court, which unanimously ordered Nixon to turn over the tapes. The decision ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation from the presidency.

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“They made it clear there was no executive privilege,” McConnell said of the justices’ ruling against Nixon’s claim, “in that it didn’t have anything to do with national security and it had to do with evidence of actual criminality. This is about national security,” he said of Trump’s executive order, “and there’s no allegation that a criminal law has been broken.”