There’s been a recent kerfuffle over the Mueller team gaining access to emails from the Trump Transition team, sent after the election but before he took office. If you’re wondering if Trump is on to something, consider this opinion from a real expert, published in WaPo:
Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor who teaches white collar crime at George Washington University Law School, said it was not at all surprising that Mueller’s team sought Trump transition emails. “It would be almost prosecutorial misconduct for them not to,” he said. He said it was also not surprising that Mueller would ask GSA for emails sent using government accounts.
“It’s not your personal email. If it ends in .gov, you don’t have any expectation of privacy,” he said.
But he said if Trump’s team had a valid legal claim, there is a standard avenue to pursue — they would file a sealed motion to the judge supervising the grand jury and ask the judge to rule the emails were improperly seized and provide a remedy, like requiring Mueller’s team to return the emails or excluding their use in the investigation.
“You go to the judge and complain,” he said. “You don’t issue a press release or go to Congress. It appears from the outside that this is part of a pattern of trying to undermine Mueller’s investigation.”
So the question becomes whether or not Trump supporters are naive enough to only get their information from President Trump and his propaganda information arms – aka fake news services. If they are not that naive, then they’ll know that the real experts – and remember, Trump is nothing more than a real estate developer – are just shaking their heads at this latest effort to mislead Trump’s base into thinking Special Prosecutor Mueller – a registered Republican – is somehow cheating.
This is part of a larger pattern that has been commented on extensively in the politically independent as well as, of course, liberal media sources. But it bears repeating that the attempts to dismiss Mueller’s investigation as somehow partisan are also tainting institutions whose political independence are critical to the continuing prosperity of our Republic. To the extent that politicization escapes from its proper corral and either taints non-partisan institutions falsely as political, or actually manages to corrupt them, our Republic is diminished and proper respect is lost to the conclusions of government. The right has spent more than a decade deprecating the conclusions of climate scientists working in government roles as politically motivated, and the result is a climate change debate unnecessarily politicized, resulting in the United States losing the leadership role it should properly exercising with gusto, and, instead becoming a pariah. This example should be a caution to us, not an encouragement to dismiss any agency producing conclusions that we find vaguely distasteful or completely unpalatable.
Our parents and grandparents were willing to swallow sour medicine when it was clear that it was needed. When will today’s conservatives admit that their lust for power has led them to the gates of Hell?
