The Friday Night Dump came on Saturday.
And, it’s a doozy.
Scoop: Mueller obtains “tens of thousands” of Trump transition emails
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has obtained “many tens of thousands” of Trump transition emails, including emails of Jared Kushner, transition team sources tell Axios.
- Trump officials discovered Mueller had the emails when his prosecutors used them as the basis for questions to witnesses, the sources said.
The emails include 12 accounts, one of which contains about 7,000 emails, the sources said.
The accounts include the team’s political leadership and the foreign-policy team, the sources said.
Why it matters: The transition emails are said to include sensitive exchanges on matters that include potential appointments, gossip about the views of particular senators involved in the confirmation process, speculation about vulnerabilities of Trump nominees, strategizing about press statements, and policy planning on everything from war to taxes.
“Mueller is using the emails to confirm things, and get new leads,” a transition source told me.
How it happened: The sources say Mueller obtained the emails from the General Services Administration, the government agency that hosted the transition email system, which had addresses ending in “ptt.gov,” for Presidential Transition Team.
Some back story Twitter tea on this:
The Hoarse Whisperer @HoarseWisperer
Settle in, politikids.You’re going to enjoy this…
I’ve read the full letter Trump transition team attorneys sent to legislators re: Mueller obtaining their emails.
It has a delicious reveal.
1/
As we now know: 1) Mueller obtained ALL of the emails sent to/from Trump transition team accounts 2) The Trump gang only realized this after Mueller’s team seemed to know all about their emails 3) This made them quite… upset
4) Thier lawyers then wrote the letter in the link to congressmen complaining about just how upsetting all of this is. Here’s the classically amusing reveal in the letter…
Earlier this year, Trump appointed the top attorney at the office responsible for providing all the electronics and email accounts the Trump transition team used. That attorney’s name was Richard Backler.
Now, as background, Backler was a white collar criminal defense attorney before his appointment. He helped rich criminals beat government convictions for a firm with a name you’ll find familiar. Bracewell & Giuliani.
So, Trump appointed Backler and then Backler went and ensured Trump transition team attorneys that he would not allow his org (the GSA) to provide any of their emails to investigators. One problem: Backler fell ill and ultimately passed away.
So, until Mueller’s crew started asking Trump aides about those emails, they had absolutely no idea Mueller had them because they thought Trump’s guy on the inside was running interference for them. Let that one sink in.
Trump and his flunkies thought their friend at the GSA had locked their emails away *literally* in a vault no one could get to… They thought their bodies were all buried.
As a result, Trump’s people walked into their interviews with Mueller and team with a completely false sense of confidence that he didn’t know what he already knew in spades. They thought he was fishing. He was just reeling fish in.
Renato MariottiVerified account @renato_mariotti
THREAD: Why are Trump’s lawyers upset that Mueller obtained transition emails from a government agency? (Hint: They’re just playing politics, but this is a bad sign for them.)
3:03 PM – 16 Dec 20171/ Today @axios reported that Mueller obtained tens of thousands of emails from the General Services Administration, which possessed them.
2/ @axios reported that the emails included very frank discussions as well as emails from Jared Kushner. Trump’s team was unaware that Mueller possessed the emails and were surprised when Mueller’s team asked questions based on the emails.
3/ Now Trump’s team has written a letter to Congress, complaining that some of the materials were “susceptible to privilege claims.” So what does this mean?
4/ First of all, it’s not unusual at all for prosecutors to obtain emails from other parties. That’s extremely common in white collar criminal investigations and is not improper.
5/ What *is* unusual here is that Mueller obtained emails from GSA even though he could have obtained (many of) the same emails from lawyers for the Trump Transition.
6/ Typically, in a white collar case, prosecutors obtain as many emails and documents as possible from defense attorneys instead of from another source.
7/ That’s because the defense team would review the emails, take out the ones that are not relevant, sort the emails, and put them in a format could be useable by Mueller.
8/ When a prosecutor obtains emails from a third party, usually irrelevant emails aren’t sorted out. So why would Mueller get the emails from GSA instead?
9/ One reason comes to mind. Mueller was concerned that he wouldn’t receive all of the emails if he obtained them from the Trump team. That’s surprising and suggests that he has reason to distrust Trump’s team.
.@chrisgeidner spoke to a senior GSA lawyer, who said of the Trump transition team: “In using our devices," transition team members were informed that materials "would not be held back in any law enforcement" actions.
"Therefore, no expectation of privacy can be assumed." pic.twitter.com/D0uqNtgR9S— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) December 17, 2017
Mueller just hauled in "thousands" of emails from the Mike Pence-led transition
It's closing in on the VPhttps://t.co/HPqrs7xKOb pic.twitter.com/pH2WcRUhAs
— American Journal News (@AmerIndependent) December 17, 2017
YES!!
Folks,
We wonder why we haven’t seen hide not hair of Rudy ‘911’ in awhile.
It was his responsibility to take care of the email problem.
He did that by installing one of the partners of his firm into the head of the GSA.
But, the dude died, and didn’t bury the emails.
They, of course, don’t respect bureaucracy, so, there was nothing there but career staffers when Bobby Three Sticks came a knocking, and they followed the law.😄😄
What was left unsaid:
Bobby Three Sticks knew the answer to the questions he asked.
Can we say
LYING TO THE FBI, Boys and Girls?😄😄😄😄
One of the things that I am enjoying most?
We don’t find out anything about what Bobby Three Sticks is doing, until he wants us to. This happened MONTHS ago 😄
He knows that’s not true because he’s guilty as sin. He’s just psyching out the gullible.
https://twitter.com/thehill/status/942924228961144832
(in a low creepy voice and rubbing my hands together) “He gone git it!”
FBI warned Trump in 2016 Russians would try to infiltrate his campaign
WASHINGTON — In the weeks after he became the Republican nominee on July 19, 2016, Donald Trump was warned that foreign adversaries, including Russia, would probably try to spy on and infiltrate his campaign, according to multiple government officials familiar with the matter.
…………………………..
In case folks don’t recognize it…
They are taking away ‘ we were all neophytes and didn’t really understand campaigning’ excuse for the upcoming charges of Conspiracy Against the United States.
Rudy’s been quiet as a mouse. LOCK HIS ASS UP!
HEY NOW!
Trump World doesn’t respond well to Mueller obtaining emails
12/18/17 08:00 AM—UPDATED 12/18/17 08:06 AM
By Steve Benen
………………………………………………..
Mueller’s team apparently obtained these materials through the GSA as part of the ongoing probe. According to an Axios report, Team Trump discovered that the special counsel had the emails “when his prosecutors used them as the basis for questions to witnesses.”
And this, in turn, appears to have caused a great deal of anxiety within Trump World. Indeed, by some accounts, officials with the president’s transition team, which evidently still exists, want Mueller’s investigators to give the emails back.
It’s a story with several important angles, but let’s start with the most entertaining one: the folks who wanted Russian operatives to steal Hillary Clinton’s emails are the same folks who are outraged that the special counsel’s office obtained government emails stored on a government server.
Because time is a flat circle, it’s hard not to appreciate the fact that as 2017 comes to a close, one of the big political controversies of the day is focused on … wait for it … email server management.
What’s more, it’s also worth appreciating the reason behind the Trump World’s apoplexy. Yahoo News’ Garance Franke-Ruta noted over the weekend, “The big freak-out over Mueller having the transition emails is that it means any interviewees who lied to the FBI about matters contained therein is already caught because the FBI has the record of what happened.”