It's reckless because you didn't have to do it. There's a way you can allow the attorneys to raise privilege arguments, perhaps go to a court, you can get a subpoena. There's lots of avenues in which you could acquire these emails. And he probably would have acquired them. The question is why take the risk?
This is a somewhat ambiguous area. Where the Trump attorney is correct is that these transition documents are not the property of the GSA, they're not agency material. All those communications before the inauguration belonged to the transition team. So they have a valid point there. Now, whether this is enough to taint the investigation, probably not but the question is why muscle it through? Why not give the attorneys a chance to make privileged arguments?
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We have no evidence of a subpoena being issued here. And the people that owned these documents are the transition team. They clearly didn't give their approval. In fact, they objected to it. What's concerning to me is they had an objection on the record from counsel saying these are confidential files, there are privileged things in here. And then you had this muscle play.
The question is what did they do to protect the information? And the Trump team says they have information that indicates that Mueller didn't create what's called a firewall, which is to place this type of information in control of a very few people who would then protect it, contain it so it doesn't taint other evidence. According to the Trump attorneys, they just took this and dumped it in the special counsel's office. So if there is a problem here, eventually the use of this evidence, you can have a contamination problem. This could come back to haunt them.
Jonathan Turley, of George Washington University
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/v...ump_campaign_documents_why_take_the_risk.html
