Trump transition team accuses Mueller of unlawfully obtaining private emails
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Attorneys representing President Trump's transition team on Saturday accused Special Counsel Robert Mueller of unlawfully obtaining tens of thousands of private emails as part of his probe into Russian election meddling and alleged Trump campaign involvement.
The lawyers sent a letter to the oversight committees of both houses of Congress claiming Mueller has run afoul of both attorney-client privilege and the Fourth Amendment's restrictions on search and seizure. The emails in question were obtained from the General Services Administration (GSA), which the letter says "did not own or control the records" but handed them over to Mueller anyway.
Mueller's office denied wrongdoing, stating it has always "secured either the account owner's consent or appropriate criminal process" in accessing emails for the investigation. The GSA said the transition team was informed there was no expectation of privacy for these records, and that the transition team was never promised that it would be informed or consulted before the records were distributed.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
