Here are the latest games from Trump's shoddy legal team - By Jennifer Rubin

[DonViejo]

Panic is setting in.

By Jennifer Rubin December 18 at 11:30 AM

The strongest indication of President Trump’s precarious legal situation is his legal team’s propensity to make political, not to mention hysterical, accusations in lieu of legal arguments. One supposes that if Trump’s lawyers had meritorious points, they would make them in a proper legal forum, as Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) suggested with regard to the lawyers’ temper tantrum over thousands of transition team emails acquired by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III from the General Services Administration.

Politico reports:

Trump’s transition legal team wrote a letter to two congressional committees, including Gowdy’s, on Saturday alleging that Mueller’s team had inappropriately obtained thousands of transition emails that were housed on government servers. The transition team said it hoped the findings would be “useful in discharging your oversight responsibilities, ensuring the integrity of the special counsel’s investigation.” It also suggested new laws protecting future presidential transitions from unwanted disclosure of emails. But Gowdy’s spokeswoman said the issues raised by the transition were “specific legal issues” regarding claims of privileged information and that those matters belonged in court, not Congress.

If, of course, Trump’s legal team went to court, it would need a viable legal claim. Legal experts are flummoxed as to what the basis might be for challenging the acquisition of documents relevant to the Russia inquiry. (Fear of gross embarrassment isn’t a legitimate one.) For one thing, Trump would have to attack his own appointees at the GSA for turning over the documents, which cannot by definition be covered by presidential executive privilege because Trump wasn’t yet president. The Post quotes former prosecutor Randall Eliason as saying that the transition emails are “not your personal email. If it ends in .gov, you don’t have any expectation of privacy.” Likewise, Ben Wittes of Lawfare blog tells me, “When you use government devices you do so with the explicit understanding that you have no expectation of privacy. Moreover, if there is a complaint here, it is a complaint about GSA for overbroad production, not against Mueller for seeking materials that are obviously germane to his investigation.”

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2017/12/18/here-are-the-latest-games-from-trumps-shoddy-legal-team/?utm_term=.d0b4aa4d5310

[smirkymonkey]

1. K&R

[rock]

2. It is not the government's duty

to help the criminal cover up evidence of the crime.

[Hekate]

3. KnR