Mueller Files first Charges (MUELLER CONTENT GOES HERE)

[Averageman]

It would appear so, at least to me.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017...sia-probe.html

Langhofer wrote in Saturday's letter that the GSA handed over “tens of thousands of emails” to Mueller's probe without "any notice" to the transition.

The attorney said they discovered the “unauthorized disclosures” by the GSA on Dec. 12 and 13 and raised concerns with the special counsel’s office. The Associated Press reported that the GSA turned over a flash drive containing tens of thousands of records on Sept. 1 after receiving requests from Mueller's office in late August.

Those records included emails sent and received by 13 senior Trump transition officials. Among the officials who used transition email accounts was former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to a count of making false statements to FBI agents in January and is now cooperating with Mueller's investigation.

“We understand that the special counsel’s office has subsequently made extensive use of the materials it obtained from the GSA, including materials that are susceptible to privilege claims," Langhofer wrote. He added that some of the records obtained by the special counsel’s office from the GSA “have been leaked to the press by unknown persons.”

https://www.axios.com/new-trump-offi...518147669.html

What's new: A source close to Trump's transition, which still exists as a legal entity so it can shut down what was once a 1,000-person operation, said the transition will send a letter to Mueller informing him that some of the emails are privileged, and asking for their return. The transition says it is willing to provide Mueller with vetted emails.

The source told me: "What they did is totally illegal, and they need to fix it." But Peter Carr, spokesman for the Special Counsel's Office, told Axios early this morning: "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."

Be smart: Republicans, who have been raising increasing questions about Mueller's office, are prepared to argue that if emails were obtained by questionable means, that could taint or undermine the investigation.
What happened: Axios reported yesterday afternoon that officials of Trump's Presidential Transition Team, his office for the 73 days between the election and the inauguration, discovered that Mueller had obtained huge caches of emails from the General Services Administration, the government agency that hosted the transition's "ptt.gov" emails.

What's at stake: We're told that the fight involves emails from the accounts of 12 officials, including members of the political leadership and foreign-policy team. One of the accounts alone includes 7,000 emails.
Trump officials discovered Mueller had the emails when his prosecutors used them as the basis for questions to witnesses, the sources said.
Why it matters: The transition emails are said to include sensitive exchanges on matters such as 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.


https://www.politico.com/story/2017/...-jordan-299578
Republicans have zeroed in on FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, top counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, FBI attorney Lisa Page, and former Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr and his wife, Nellie, who reportedly worked for Fusion GPS, the firm that compiled opposition research on Trump in 2016.


"Chairman Goodlatte has told us he is going to subpoena those individuals," said Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), in an appearance on Fox News' "Justice with Judge Jeanine."

Goodlatte's office declined comment earlier this week when asked if he was considering issuing subpoenas to those agents.

Republicans have focused on Strzok with greater intensity in recent days, after the Justice Department released a series of text messages he sent to Page in 2016 that showed hostility toward Trump.

Mueller can't seem to conduct this without his bias toward Comey's firing and his subordinate staffs bias for Hillary Clinton taking precedent over facts being legally gathered.
It's time to send Mueller back to his Retirement Village in Phoenix and some legal action taken against these mopes subordinate to him.

[platoonDaddy]

Much as I would like to see muller rode out of D.C., I believe this is just a weekend news ripple. I am no legal eagle, but if it was Gov property (as mueller stated) used to send & receive the emails, it is legal for the records to be turned over.

EDIT: of course just my opinion.

[FromMyColdDeadHand]

Sounds like a fine legal point. It does seem that executive privilege would or could be an issue. What happened to the HRC standard of ' we'll hand over relevant documents'. I'm sure that they are a treasure trove of political backfighting.

Can we get back to Russia?

The left already makes it out to be something big that the emails were searched, like that is proof of something.

[Averageman]

This has spun slowly out of control since the beginning.
Subtle leaks from what would most likely have to be from inside Mueller's investigation. Leaking in dribs and drabs biweekly, just enough to keep the public interest and CNN's outrage well fed.
In the meantime, the backflow shows obvious biases coming from inside the investigative team. Now thousands of documents in the form of email traffic from the Administration transition team.
So if any of this is legally questionable, at what point is something going to be done to put Mueller in check and force him to admit this whole thing is a charade?
I have this feeling the real intent is to drag this out to the midterms to see if the balance in the House and Senate changes enough to impeach the POTUS.

[26 Inf]

Just read this article, I thought it was interesting because the author is not a fan of President Trump:

The most respectable conspiracy theory in Washington

Matthew Walther, December 22, 2017

A year into Donald Trump's presidency, with the end of Robert Mueller's painstaking investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election nowhere in sight, I have a confession to make.

On multiple occasions over the last several years I have attended private meetings with individuals who are members of a Moscow-based international organization that opposes gay marriage, the European Union, globalism, and secularism. Also present at some of these meetings were right-leaning journalists, heads of think tanks, and even federal officials. Over drinks — sometimes, yes, vodka — and cigarettes, political issues were discussed, the Obama administration roundly criticized, and at least once there was a long conversation about Russian intelligence. Between meetings I communicated via email and Twitter with these individuals, who were based for a time in Australia, where both were involved in politics and even lobbying. On more than one occasion I was responsible for ensuring that payments in the four-figure range were made into the bank account of one of the individuals. A few months before the first of the above encounters, I met Trump himself at a D.C. hotel. At a later meeting, the individual I had been compensating appeared at another meeting in Manhattan with prominent social conservatives at which she made arguments on behalf of Trump. A few months later he was president.

I hope Mueller's people are taking notes. The fact that the individuals in question are old friends, one of whom contributed to a magazine where I used to be an editor, that the Russian group to which they belong is the Orthodox Church, that one of these gatherings was their wedding reception, and that the discussion of foreign intelligence was actually a conversation about the old BBC television adaptation of John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy are probably irrelevant. Written vaguely enough, filtered through two or three other sources in a kind of telephone game, they sound like a breathless Daily Beast scooplette about what I like to think of as "the Russia thing." If I lied to a federal investigator about any of this — claiming, for example, that I was not in any way involved with the payments in question even though I negotiated the rates because our accounting department was responsible for mailing the check or getting the timeline of my first meeting with the president wrong — I could be writing this column under house arrest. Which might be fair, but would hardly prove "collusion."

That Trump in some unknown and indescribable but absolutely significant manner "colluded" — whatever that might involve — with "Russia" — a vague entity that might refer to anything or anyone from a nameless academic to Vladimir Putin himself — in order to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton, who was otherwise an attractive candidate with a firm base of support even in the states she didn't bother to visit, is now one of the most begged questions in American history.

It's time to stop begging it. The investigation that began under James Comey and has continued under Robert Mueller has turned up absolutely nothing to support this thesis. Michael Flynn lied to the FBI about a conversation with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that took place after the election, which is shocking if you want to pretend that there is anything out of the ordinary about a member of a presidential transition team contacting foreign officials. An obscure character named George Papadopoulos once emailed an equally obscure character known only as "the Professor," an exchange that went nowhere. Paul Manafort has pled not guilty to money laundering, which is as unsurprising as it is far removed from what the investigation is supposed to be about. The Russia thing is a tedious and lurid spectacle, a shooting match, like Whitewater before it, in which armed participants are allowed to circle endlessly, at taxpayers' expense, around invisible targets that they mysteriously never manage to hit but whose existence is as obvious to one group of partisan onlookers as it is unthinkable to the other.

It is also a master course in how to construct a political narrative, something reporters and commentators do without realizing it. Most of them have memories as short as those of their readers and a frame of reference that, except for a handful of clichés about McCarthyism and Boss Tweed and the Compromise of 18-something-or-other, doesn't extend much further than Pizza Rat. It doesn't matter. Start with an irresistible general narrative, sprinkle in some suitably exotic if unconfirmable details about obviously grotesque characters, quote a handful of decontextualized communications, throw in some legalese that you don't understand, and you have an appalling scandal that deserves the attention of the entire American public, one that makes a mockery of the august values upon which this country was founded.

If the Russia thing has legs, so does Benghazi, a story about how individuals in the State Department actively worked to cover up the woeful under-preparedness of the security forces at a U.S. consulate in a war-torn country at the behest of the individual responsible for its ill-fated bombardment by NATO forces. So too does the new right-wing comic strip about a sinister "deep state" plot to prevent Trump from taking office — we even have a text message from an actual FBI agent admitting they have an "insurance policy" against it, guys! The news that a special prosecutor marched in to the offices of an obscure federal department and demanded records instead of obtaining them via subpoena is not going to keep me up at night agonizing over the future of the republic. But neither is anything that the Russia investigation has turned up or is ever likely to turn up.

I am not a partisan. Trump is a wicked man and his presidency a colossal failure. I would gladly see him impeached tomorrow, removed from office, and replaced with Bob, a guy I know from the coffee shop by my house.

That doesn't mean I'm going to pretend that "Russia" rather than the voters of Macomb County elected him president or that it is a good use of anyone's time to spend any more than a year of federal resources combing through Nigerian prince emails and asking gotcha questions trying to prove otherwise.

https://theweek.com/articles/744702/...ory-washington

[Diamondback]

Here's the problem... if Mueller can wipe his worthless Clinton Machine ass on the Rule of Law, the Constitution and Attorney-Client Privilege in chasing the Great White Whale Trump, he or any other DOJ/Special Counsel/Deep State Goonstapo can do it to ANY of us.

[FromMyColdDeadHand]

The biggest problem with the Collusion charge is that there would have had to be a lot of communications back and forth on when, where and what to press. Even the Dems have set that standard by saying that the Russian targeting was 'too good' and that the Russians must have had Americans directing the attacks.

The problem is that all leaves a trail. It takes a large number of people to be involved. Lots of electronic records. And none of that has been found. Now that means that either it didn't happen or that Trump and his guys are adept enough to out smart the NSA....

Here is something else to consider. The Russians wanted to hurt HRC in the election, but they never thought that they could stop her from being elected. I have heard reports that the Russians were holding back on the best stuff they had on HRC to hurt her when she could actually hurt them- after she was elected. Benghazi linked arms deals, shady legal stuff with the email scandal, the actual 30k missing emails, Bill's bimbos. The list of stuff that wouldn't take much to be true is long. But HRC lost, so that stuff has little value. And unlike my 12 year old son who blabs everything he knows as soon as he knows it, the Russians are sitting on it because it is little to gain from releasing it.

[Diamondback]

The Russians wanted to hurt not a candidate, but our electoral process and our confidence in it--this is what they've been doing in Europe for years.

Oh BTW, they tried to hack into the RNC too, just that GOP IT actually HAD the brains God gave a steaming pile of monkey crap and managed to keep 'em out. Not the GOP's fault that John Podesta was so stupid as to go for the bait so hard the hook popped clear out his ass...

[glocktogo]

The Russians wanted to hurt not a candidate, but our electoral process and our confidence in it--this is what they've been doing in Europe for years.

Oh BTW, they tried to hack into the RNC too, just that GOP IT actually HAD the brains God gave a steaming pile of monkey crap and managed to keep 'em out. Not the GOP's fault that John Podesta was so stupid as to go for the bait so hard the hook popped clear out his ass...

So in other words, they were doing exactly what the United States has been doing, which is undermine foreign elections when it suited our interests.

[Coal Dragger]

Correct.