The Problem With Special Prosecutors Is That They Don’t Have Limits Even When They Are Supposed To Have Limits

If we think back to recent (a year) history, Robert Mueller was appointed as a special prosecutor to investigate whether or not there was Russian interference in the 2016 election. He has been searching for a year, and so far has charged two people formerly associated with the Trump Administration with crimes unrelated to the purpose of his investigation. It seems as if he is using his unlimited budget to follow rabbit trails. Now there is a new controversy about some of those rabbit trails.

Yesterday Townhall posted an article about some recent problems with the Mueller investigation.

The article reports:

According to Axios, special counsel Robert Mueller has confiscated thousands of e-mails and communications from President Donald J. Trump’s transition team, including from notable figures such as Jared Kushner and other high profile aides.

“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.”

These e-mails supposedly all occurred after  the 2016 presidential election. Mueller’s investigation is explicitly to determine if there was any Russian interference before the election that could have rigged the results for Donald Trump. But, according to Axios’ source “Mueller is using the emails to confirm things, and get new leads.”

If these are the emails of the transition team, they have nothing to do with events before the election–they are the records of the new administration organizing its policies. They are subject to executive privilege and to the Fourth Amendment. It sounds as if neither was honored.

The article concludes:

As Fox News notes, Langhofer says that Mueller’s team gained access to the e-mails via the General Services Administration. The Transition team was using the GSA’s office space and e-mails severs. Trump’s attorneys say that in doing so, Mueller may have violated the 4th amendment by asking the GSA for e-mails which were supposed to be private and secure. 

According to Reuters, the letter says “career staff members at the agency unlawfully produced TFA’s private materials, including privileged communications, to the Special Counsel’s Office.”

Stay tuned.