Ramping up the effort to discredit Mueller

In a letter sent to the House and the Senate and seen by Fox News, Kory Langhofer, lawyer for Trump’s transition team, claimed that Mueller obtained “tens of thousands of emails,” including confidential communications between a client and a lawyer, due to “unlawful conduct” by the staffers at the General Services Administration (GSA), which hosted the Trump team’s email servers during the transition.

Accusing the GSA of “unauthorized disclosures” for giving Mueller access to private information it “did not own or control,” Langhofer went to blame the agency for infringing on the right of the US citizens to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, as guaranteed by the 4th Amendment.

  RT

Well, that's rich. And should they win the argument (which they won't, unless Trump has every judge in the country replaced), I expect to see the NSA divested of its right to spy on us all.

Trump’s team discovered what it believes a breach of privacy on December 12 and December 13, the lawyer said, noting that some of the compromised materials were leaked to the media by “unknown persons.”

I'll let Mr. Mueller handle this, but if he utilized emails that were leaked to the media, he didn't obtain them "illegally". If he got them by subpoena from individuals who wrote and received them, this is a huge nothing.

The growing pile of revelations is still unlikely to jeopardize the entire investigation. On Saturday, the White House said it is not considering firing Mueller despite the controversies.

"As the White House has consistently said for months, there is no consideration of firing the special counsel," Ty Cobb, the White House special counsel, said in a statement to CNN.

I expect that's true for a number of reasons, but one of them is not that you can trust what this administration says.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

UPDATE:

Mueller’s office got the records earlier this summer from the General Services Administration, the government agency charged with holding all transition materials, even while it was “aware that the GSA did not own or control the records in question,” Langhofer wrote.

The Trump attorney also argued that Mueller’s office has “extensively used the materials in question” during its investigation even though its prosecutors were aware some of the materials were subject to claims of attorney-client privilege and other protections.

Mueller spokesman Peter Carr defended the special counsel’s work in a statement issued just past midnight on Sunday, several hours after this story first posted. “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,” he said.

  Politico

But the GOP and Trump's lawyers (as the lawyers should, but not the GOP) are going to throw every wrench at their disposal into Mueller's investigation, whether it sticks or not. It makes Mueller's team have to send someone off to deflect it.

"I seriously doubt there is anything here to taint the [Mueller] investigation," said William Jeffress, a white-collar defense attorney who represented Vice President Dick Cheney’s senior aide, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, during the Valerie Plame CIA leak investigation. Jeffress added the letter included no evidence to prove any privileged information had been obtained by Mueller's team and that even if it were, there are procedures for retrieving them.

FURTHER UPDATE: Apparently, Mueller's team got the emails from the GSA, who informed Trump's transition team at the time that anything they ran through their services would be preserved and should not be considered private. This bullshit complaint by Trump's lawyer is just that: bullshit. He knows it, but it's not unusual given that his job is to defend Trump in whatever ways possible, including muddying the waters, lying to the press, and blowing as much smoke as he can into Mueller's investigation.

Marcy Wheeler has a post explaining why this is all bullshit.