Special counsel obtains thousands of Trump transition emails

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Special counsel obtains thousands of Trump transition emails

2017-12-17 10:57 Last Updated At：10:57

Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian contacts with President Donald Trump's campaign has gained access to thousands of emails sent and received by Trump officials before the start of his administration, according to several people familiar with Trump's transition organization.

But the investigators did not directly request the records from Trump's still-existing transition group, Trump for America, and instead obtained them from a separate federal agency that stored the material, according to those familiar with the Trump transition organization.

A transition attorney sent letters Saturday to two congressional committees saying the General Services Administration had improperly provided the transition records to Mueller's investigators. Kory Langhofer, general counsel for the transition group, wrote to the Republican chairmen of the House Oversight committee and the Senate Homeland Security committee about what the transition contends was an "unauthorized" disclosure of its emails.

The GSA has provided office space and other aid to presidential transitions in recent years and typically houses electronic transition records in its computer system. But Trump for America considers the records private and privileged and not government property.

The people familiar with the transition organization spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because of the records' sensitivity.

They said the materials included communications from more than a dozen senior Trump transition officials. Among the officials who used transition email accounts was former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to a count of making false statements to FBI agents in January and is now cooperating with Mueller's investigation. Flynn was fired by Trump in February for misleading senior administration officials about his contacts with Russia's ambassador to the U.S.

It's unclear how revelatory the email accounts maintained by the GSA will be for Mueller. Several high-level Trump advisers sometimes used other email accounts to communicate about transition issues between Election Day and the inauguration.

Mueller's spokesman, Peter Carr, declined to comment. Jay Sekulow, an attorney on Trump's personal legal team, referred questions to the transition group. Neither GSA representatives nor Flynn attorney Robert Kelner were immediately available to respond to AP's emailed requests for comment.

Officials with Trump for America learned last Wednesday that GSA officials had turned over the massive cache of emails to Mueller's team. The transition group's top officials were alarmed because many of the emails that Mueller's investigators now have are sensitive records ranging from national security discussions about possible Trump international aims to candid assessments of candidates for top government posts, said those familiar with the transition.

Officials with Trump for America had been bracing for months for the prospect that Mueller's team would demand its emails, but they had been assured that any requests to the GSA would be routed to the transition organization, which claims legal ownership of the records. According to those familiar with the transition group, a top GSA official informed Trump for America last June that any request from Mueller's office would be referred to the transition.

On Sept. 1, after requests in late August from Mueller's office, the GSA turned over a flash drive containing tens of thousands of records without informing Trump for America of its move, those familiar with the transition said.

Those records included emails sent and received by 13 senior Trump transition officials.

The media site Axios first reported on the transfer of the emails to Mueller's team.

Trump fined $1,000 for gag order violation in hush money case as ex-employee recounts reimbursements

2024-05-07 06:38 Last Updated At：06:40

NEW YORK (AP) — The judge in Donald Trump’s hush money trial fined him $1,000 on Monday and, in his sternest warning yet, told the former president that future gag order violations could send him to jail. The reprimand opened a revelatory day of testimony, as jurors for the first time heard the details of the financial reimbursements at the center of the case and saw payment checks bearing Trump’s signature.

The testimony from Jeffrey McConney, the former Trump Organization controller, provided a mechanical but vital recitation of how the company reimbursed payments that were allegedly meant to suppress embarrassing stories from surfacing during the 2016 presidential campaign and then logged them as legal expenses in a manner that Manhattan prosecutors say broke the law.

McConney's appearance on the witness stand came as the first criminal trial involving a former American president entered its third week of testimony. His account lacked the human drama offered Friday by longtime Trump aide Hope Hicks, but it nonetheless yielded an important building block for prosecutors trying to pull back the curtain on what they say was a corporate records cover-up of transactions designed to protect Trump's presidential bid during a pivotal stretch of the race.

At the center of the testimony, and the case itself, is a $130,000 payment from Trump attorney and personal fixer Michael Cohen to porn actor Stormy Daniels to stifle her claims of an extramarital sexual encounter with Trump a decade earlier.

The 34 felony counts of falsifying business records accuse Trump of labeling the money paid to Cohen in his company’s records as legal fees. Prosecutors contend that by paying him income and giving him extra to account for taxes, the Trump executives were able to conceal the reimbursement.

McConney and another witness testified that the reimbursement checks were drawn from Trump's personal account. Yet even as jurors witnessed the checks and other documentary evidence, prosecutors did not elicit testimony Monday showing that Trump himself dictated that the payments would be logged as legal expenses, a designation that prosecutors contend was intentionally deceptive.

McConney acknowledged during cross-examination that Trump never asked him to log the reimbursements as legal expenses or discussed the matter with him at all. And another witness, Deborah Tarasoff, a Trump Organization accounts payable supervisor, said under questioning that she did not get permission to cut the checks in question from Trump himself.

“You never had any reason to believe that President Trump was hiding anything or anything like that?” Trump attorney Todd Blanche asked.

”Correct,” Tarasoff replied.

The testimony followed a stern warning from Judge Juan M. Merchan that additional violations of a gag order barring Trump from inflammatory out-of-court comments about witnesses, jurors and others closely connected to the case could result in jail time.

The $1,000 fine imposed Monday marks the second time since the trial began last month that Trump has been sanctioned for violating the gag order. He was fined $9,000 last week, $1,000 for each of nine violations.

“It appears that the $1,000 fines are not serving as a deterrent. Therefore going forward, this court will have to consider a jail sanction,” Merchan said before jurors were brought into the courtroom. Trump’s statements, the judge added, “threaten to interfere with the fair administration of justice and constitute a direct attack on the rule of law. I cannot allow that to continue.”

Trump sat forward in his seat, glowering at the judge as he handed down the ruling. When the judge finished speaking, Trump shook his head twice and crossed his arms.

Yet even as Merchan warned of jail time in his most pointed and direct admonition, he also made clear his reservations about a step that he described as a “last resort.”

“The last thing I want to do is put you in jail,” Merchan said. “You are the former president of the United States and possibly the next president as well. There are many reasons why incarceration is truly a last resort for me. To take that step would be disruptive to these proceedings.”

The latest violation stems from an April 22 interview with television channel Real America’s Voice in which Trump criticized the speed at which the jury was picked and claimed, without evidence, that it was stacked with Democrats.

Once testimony resumed, McConney recounted conversations with longtime Trump Organization finance chief Allen Weisselberg in January 2017 about reimbursing Cohen for a $130,000 payment intended to buy Daniels' silence over her account of a sexual encounter at a 2006 celebrity golf outing in Lake Tahoe, California.

Weisselberg "said we had to get some money to Michael, we had to reimburse Michael. He tossed a pad toward me, and I started taking notes on what he said,” McConney testified. “That’s how I found out about it.”

“He kind of threw the pad at me and said, ‘Take this down,’” said McConney, who worked for Trump’s company for about 36 years, retiring last year after he was granted immunity to testify for the prosecution at the Trump Organization’s New York criminal tax fraud trial.

A bank statement displayed in court showed Cohen paying $130,000 to Keith Davidson, Daniels' lawyer, on Oct. 27, 2016, out of an account for an entity Cohen created for the purpose.

Weisselberg’s handwritten notes spell out a plan to pay Cohen $420,000, which included a base reimbursement that was then doubled to reflect anticipated taxes as well as a $60,000 bonus and an expense that prosecutors have described as a technology contract.

McConney’s own notes, taken on the notepad he said Weisselberg threw at him, were also shown in court. After calculations that laid out that Cohen would get $35,000 a month for 12 months, McConney wrote: “wire monthly from DJT.”

Asked what that meant, McConney said: “That was out of the president’s personal bank account.”

Trump is accused of falsifying business records by labeling the money paid to Cohen in his company’s records as legal fees. Prosecutors contend that by paying him income and giving him extra to account for taxes, the Trump executives were able to conceal the reimbursement.

McConney testified that he had instructed an accounting department employee to record the reimbursements to Cohen as a legal expense.

But McConney acknowledged under cross-examination that Trump never directed him to log Cohen’s payments as legal expenses, nor did Weisselberg relay to him that Trump wanted them logged that way.

“Allen never told me that,” McConney testified. In fact, McConney said he never spoke to Trump about the reimbursement issue at all. Defense lawyer Emil Bove also suggested to McConney that the “legal expenses” label was not duplicitous because Cohen was in fact a lawyer.

“OK,” McConney responded, prompting laughter throughout the courtroom. “Sure. Yes.”

After paying the first two checks to Cohen through a trust, the remainder of the checks, beginning in April 2017, were paid from Trump’s personal account, McConney testified.

With Trump, the only signatory to that account, now in the White House, the change in funding source necessitated “a whole new process for us,” McConney added.

Tarasoff, the other witness who testified Monday, said that once Trump became president, payments from his personal account had to first be delivered, via FedEx, to his new residence in Washington.

“We would send them to the White House for him to sign,” she said.

The checks would then return with Trump’s sharpie signature. “I’d pull them apart, mail out the check and file the backup,” she said, meaning putting the invoice into the Trump Organization’s filing system.

Prosecutors are continuing to build toward their star witness, Cohen, who pleaded guilty to federal charges related to the hush money payments. He is expected to undergo a bruising cross-examination from defense attorneys seeking to undermine his credibility with jurors.

Tucker reported from Washington.