What Emails ? .. Oh .. THOSE Emails !

[toucana]

The Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller apparently obtained *all* the emails of the Trump transition team (as well as the contents of their laptops and cell phones) as long ago as last August according to an exclusive report by Axios today.

https://www.axios.com/scoop-mueller-obtains-tens-of-thousands-of-trump-transition-emails-2517994590.html

Mueller's staff obtained around 50,000 unredacted emails across at least seven major accounts with ptt.gov terminations from the General Services Administration (GSA) which was the government funded organisation that provided offices, clerical services and email hosting to the Trump transition team.

The Special prosecutor's office subsequently made an official request to the White House for the same email archives without disclosing that they already had them. Trump's legal team handed over only a tiny fraction of the emails and implied that executive privilege covered anything they had had not provided.

Trump officials only belatedly discovered Mueller had all the emails when his prosecutors used them as the basis for questions to witnesses including multiple members of President Trump's staff, the sources said.

Kory Langhofer, counsel for the transition team has now cried 'foul' in a seven page letter to congressional committees Saturday saying that "career staff at the General Services Administration ... have unlawfully produced [transition team] private materials, including privileged communications, to the Special Counsel's Office."

The letter says this was a violation of Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

That letter itself has been leaked in its entirety to Axios.

In other developments, Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law who features prominently in the transition team email exchanges is now reported to be seeking to enlist the help of a specialist crisis management PR company, according to a report in the Washington Post.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/kushners-legal-team-looks-to-hire-crisis-public-relations-firm/2017/12/15/6fbf144c-e1c3-11e7-9eb6-e3c7ecfb4638_story.html?utm_term=.52e3999f3abc

[toucana]

Attempts by Trump's lawyers to claim that the transition team emails were somehow protected by executive privilege were met with something close to hilarity today by lawyers and congressmen such as Ted Lieu (D-CA 33rd District), himself a former Airforce JAG prosecutor, who pointed out that emails with a .gov suffix are by definition public documents.

Lieu Tweeted:

“Courts generally unwilling to find reasonable right to privacy for .gov emails. Also, since Trump lawyers don’t know what leads Mueller is investigating, they won’t know which emails may be important. This seems like another desperate attempt to smear the Mueller investigation.”

The surrender of the email archives back in August happened under the watch of Trump's own Federal Transition Coordinator (FTC) Tim Horne who was the acting head of GSA administration until recently. Here is a video of him handing over to Emily W. Murphy just five days ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfwM_F8f6o0&feature=youtu.be

The disclosure that Special Counsel Mueller already had copies of every single transition team email helps explain what happened a fortnight ago when former Deputy National Security Advisor K. T. McFarland was exposed in a newspaper leak to the NYT as having been deceptive when interviewed by the Special counsel's investigators

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/04/us/politics/kt-mcfarland-flynn-russia-emails-congressional-testimony.html

She was confronted with the text of the following email sent by her around the time of NSA Michael Flynn's notorious 29 December phone call to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak which included the following jaw-dropping sentence:

General Flynn is talking to the Russian ambassador this evening. If there is a tit-for-tat escalation, Trump will have difficulty improving relations with Russia which has just thrown U.S.A. election to him.

K.T. Mcfarland who has recently been nominated as ambassador to Singapore had previously told a very different version of this story when answering questions in writing to Senator Cory Brooker (D-NJ) of the Foreign Relations committee.

It would now appear that Robert Mueller's staff released this information to the press as a warning shot to the Trump transition team.

[toucana]

Statement issued by Peter Carr on behalf of the special counsel's office.

“When we have obtained emails in the course of our ongoing criminal investigation, we have secured either the account owner’s consent or appropriate criminal process,”

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/365318-mueller-team-defends-obtaining-trump-transition-emails

This brief and very rare public statement by Robert Mueller pointedly uses the word 'criminal' twice to remind Trump's legal team that this enquiry is both a criminal investigation, and part of a wider counter-espionage operation.

[BadgerJelly]

And now Trump thinks threats will coerce nations to vote for them? So funny that Canada was going to vote for them, but changed its mind after the unbelievable threat issued directly at UN members.

This is looking more and more horrible by the day. It is now a case of agree or be punished. I just hope the backlash felt in the US over this vile attack and attempt to coerce nations out of fear to vote for them will be transparent enough for citizens of the US to be alert to what could, and likely will, happen on their own soil.

This monster is creeping. Sleep with one eye open.

[TheVat]

Yes, the "taking names" thing sounded like something that would come from a fascist dictator. A grotesque violation of the basics of diplomacy.