Robert Mueller obtained thousands of Trump transition team emails during the summer and the Trump folks had no idea he had them.

Courtesy of Axios: 

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has obtained “many tens of thousands" of Trump transition emails, including emails of Jared Kushner, transition team sources tell Axios. 

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. 

Why it matters: 

The transition emails are said to include sensitive exchanges on matters that include potential appointments, gossip about the views of particular senators involved in the confirmation process, speculation about vulnerabilities of Trump nominees, strategizing about press statements, and policy planning on everything from war to taxes. 

“Mueller is using the emails to confirm things, and get new leads," a transition source told me.

Mueller apparently circumvented the transition team by going to the government agency that hosted their email system.

Apparently the transition team had been sifting through their own emails all of this time in preparation for a subpoena from Mueller, and taking out the ones they considered privileged or sensitive.

However unbeknownst to them Mueller has already had the emails in his possession since the summer and has been using them to crosscheck against testimony from Trump folks who have come in for questioning.

If you think that might panic the Trump team, well you are certainly right about that.

Courtesy of Politico: 

A lawyer for President Donald Trump’s transition team is accusing special counsel Robert Mueller of unlawfully obtaining tens of thousands of private emails during its investigation into Russian meddling in last year’s presidential election. 

Kory Langhofer, an Arizona-based attorney representing Trump for America, spelled out the complaint in a seven-page letter sent Saturday to the main House and Senate oversight committees where he raises potential violations of attorney-client privilege and the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unlawful search and seizure. 

Mueller’s office got the records earlier this summer from the General Services Administration, the government agency charged with holding all transition materials, even while it was “aware that the GSA did not own or control the records in question,” Langhofer wrote. 

The Trump attorney also argued that Mueller’s office has “extensively used the materials in question” during its investigation even though its prosecutors were aware some of the materials were subject to claims of attorney-client privilege and other protections.

That accusation received a response from a Mueller spokesman:  

Mueller spokesman Peter Carr defended the special counsel’s work in a statement issued just past midnight on Sunday, several hours after this story first posted. “When we have obtained emails in the course of our ongoing criminal investigation, we have secured either the account owner’s consent or appropriate criminal process,” he said.

Now I am not a lawyer but I am pretty sure that translates into "Boo hoo, you lose." 

Do not forget that Mueller's team is made up of top prosecutors who know full well what they can legally do to obtain information, and this is perfectly legal.

Now Trump's lawyers are of course going to challenge this and attack the Mueller folks for outsmarting them, but essentially, and remember I am not a lawyer, the Trump folks are fucked.