The General Service Administration (GSA) secretly gave President Donald Trump’s transition team records to then-special counsel Robert Mueller and the FBI in 2017, a report by two Senate committees says.
GSA had agreed to a memorandum of understanding with Trump’s transition team that the records would be regarded as the private property of the transition team, and the GSA wouldn’t retain the records at the conclusion of the transition.
GSA officials proactively contacted the FBI to ask if they should preserve Trump transition team records on Feb. 15, 2017, after Michael Flynn resigned as Trump’s national security adviser, the majority staff report released on Oct. 23 by the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and its Finance Committee shows. The agency then decided to preserve all of the Trump transition team’s records after the FBI requested it to preserve records associated with Flynn.
The GSA officials’ offer to the FBI to preserve the Trump transition team’s records came after the removal process of the records had begun on Jan. 26, 2017, according to the terms of the memorandum.
The removal process was stopped afterward.
The GSA took the unsolicited action despite not receiving a formal preservation request until June 12, 2017.
The GSA decided to not tell the White House or counsel for the Trump transition team about the preservation. The agency also refused to honor the team’s request to access those records when requested.
The GSA and Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to requests by The Epoch Times for comment.
In August 2017, Mueller’s team requested and received records for 13 officials in the transition team, including those of then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, then-national security adviser to the vice president Keith Kellogg, and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
The report doesn’t mention which GSA officials contacted the FBI on their own initiative to give the transition records after Flynn’s resignation.
“Given the news cycles, GSA decided it was prudent to inquire about preservation during the machine wiping process, so we reached out to the [GSA Inspector General], who contacted the FBI or DOJ and got the ball rolling for GSA’s preservation of records,” GSA associate general counsel Seth Greenfeld summarized the events in a June 8, 2017, email to Lenny Loewentritt, then-acting general counsel at GSA.
The “news cycles” were referring to the resignation of Flynn, according to the GSA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) counsel Ed Martin.
During that time, Denise Turner Roth, an Obama appointee, was the leader of the GSA until Timothy Horne was appointed as acting administrator on Jan. 20, 2017, by Trump. Horne served until another Trump appointee, Emily Murphy, was sworn in as GSA head on Dec. 12, 2017.
The staff report says the newly discovered GSA’s breaching of the memorandum of understanding with the Trump transition team is “another example of the disparate treatment the Trump campaign and administration received from the federal bureaucracy.”
“The purpose of this staff report is transparency, to provide the public an understanding of how exactly the transition process was corrupted in 2016 so that it does not happen again,” the report states.
The new law requires the GSA to direct any third-party inquiry or legal process concerning transition records to representatives designated by the presidential transition teams. It also shortens the GSA service period for the transition teams from 150 days to 60 days.
