Washington Examiner - Political News and Conservative Analysis About Congress, the President, and the Federal Government The FBI and special counsel Robert Mueller’s team secretly sought and received access to the private records of President-elect Trump’s transition team from the General Services Administration despite an agreement between Trump and the administrative agency, according to a new Senate report.
Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, who have been leading a joint inquiry into a variety of controversies related to the Russia investigation, released a 26-page report on Friday titled Don’t Brief the Trump Team: How the GSA and the FBI Secretly Shared Trump Transition Team Records in which they criticized Mueller, the bureau, and the GSA.
“The United States is renowned for its peaceful transitions of power. Since at least the early 1960s, presidential candidates have received government assistance in forming and administering their transition teams. Every major presidential candidate over the past five decades — both winners and losers in the general election — has made use of government assistance to support his or her transition team under the assumption that government employees were cooperating with the team in good faith,” the GOP Senate report said. “That presumption of good faith was called into question in 2016. This majority staff report tells an important, yet overlooked, story about how” the FBI and Mueller’s team “secretly sought and received access to the private records of” Trump for America, Inc. “despite the terms of a memorandum of understanding between” Trump’s transition team and the GSA “that those records were the transition team’s private property that would not be retained at the conclusion of the transition.”
During that time frame, the report noted that Obama-appointee Denise Turner Roth was the head of the GSA until Timothy Horne’s appointment as acting administrator on Jan. 20, 2017. Horne held the role until Emily Murphy was sworn in as GSA administrator on December 12, 2017. “Even after the Trump transition team learned about the FBI’s secret preservation request, the GSA nevertheless refused to provide the Trump transition team copies of its own records,” the report said, adding that “the GSA turned those same records over to the Special Counsel without requiring any legal process, such as a subpoena or warrant.” The Homeland Security Committee received a Dec. 19, 2017 letter from Trump for America’s general counsel Kory Langhofer and the investigation of “the information provided by the GSA and the FBI confirmed this conduct and further revealed several other problems with the GSA’s stewardship of the Trump transition records,” the report said.
Trump complained about the post-2016 election transition period during the first presidential debate against former Vice President Joe Biden in late September.
“When I listen to Joe talking about a transition, there’s been no transition from when I won. I won that election, and if you look at Crooked Hillary Clinton, if you look at all of the different people, there was no transition because they came after me trying to do a coup, they came after me spying on my campaign,” Trump claimed. “They started from the day I won, and from even before I won, from the day I came down the escalator with the first lady, they were a disaster.”
The new Senate report listed a number of specific findings.
“On February 15, 2017, after watching the news about Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn’s resignation as national security advisor, GSA officials proactively contacted the FBI (through the GSA’s Office of the Inspector General) to ask if they should preserve the Trump transition team records,” the GOP report noted. “In response, the FBI asked the GSA to preserve all Trump transition team records associated with Lt. Gen. Flynn. The GSA then decided to preserve all remaining transition team records even though the GSA assured Trump for America in their memorandum of understanding that transition team records would not be retained. The GSA decided not to tell the White House about this decision. And the GSA decided not to tell counsel for Trump for America about this decision.”
The GSA also “preserved all remaining Trump transition team records for months even though the GSA did not receive a formal preservation request until June 12, 2017,” the report said. “After Trump for America learned about the preservation, the GSA refused to provide it with copies of all remaining transition team records.”
Mueller’s office “sought and received the production of all remaining transition team records for 13 different Trump for America officials, including then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, then-national security advisor to the vice president Keith Kellogg, and Jared Kushner” in August 2017, the report said. The requests were made in letters by then-FBI Assistant General Counsel Kevin Clinesmith and “not with a subpoena or search warrant.” The senators said “the GSA produced these records to the Special Counsel without affording Trump for America an opportunity to review the records for relevancy or privilege.”
Clinesmith, who worked on the investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server as well as on the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane inquiry and Mueller’s team, admitted in an August guilty plea that he falsified a document during the bureau’s efforts to renew Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act authority to wiretap former Trump campaign associate Carter Page.
A number of individuals in the Trump orbit swept up in the Mueller investigation, including former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, ended up being convicted of a variety of crimes, but none had to do with allegations of Trump-Russia collusion.
“The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion,” Mueller’s 2019 report concluded, adding that “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report criticized the Justice Department and the FBI for at least 17 “significant errors and omissions” related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against Page and for the bureau’s reliance on the Democrat-funded discredited dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele.
Declassified footnotes from Horowitz’s report indicate that the bureau became aware that Steele’s dossier might have been compromised by Russian disinformation, and FBI interviews show Steele’s primary sub-source — revealed to be U.S.-based but Russia-trained lawyer Igor Danchenko — undercut the credibility of the dossier’s biggest allegations.
A recently declassified FBI spreadsheet also showed the lack of corroboration for the dossier’s claims.
The new Senate report also addressed how declassified FBI documents show the counterintelligence briefing the bureau gave to Trump and his national security team during the 2016 campaign was used as a pretext to gather investigative evidence on the Trump campaign and Flynn.
“At bottom, the GSA and the FBI undermined the transition process by preserving Trump transition team records contrary to the terms of the memorandum of understanding, hiding that fact from the Trump transition team, and refusing to provide the team with copies of its own records,” Johnson and Grassley concluded in their report. “These actions have called into question the GSA’s role as a neutral service provider, and those doubts have consequences. Future presidential transition teams must have confidence that their use of government resources and facilities for internal communications and deliberations — including key decisions such as nominations, staffing, and significant policy changes — will not expose them to exploitation by third parties, including political opponents.”
U.S. Attorney John Durham is investigating the origins and conduct of the Trump-Russia investigation.
