Press: Trump emails fair game

That old truism about politics — “Where you stand depends on where you sit” — has been proven true, once again, when it comes to Donald Trump and emails.

How well we remember. As candidate, Trump was positively obsessed with emails: Hillary Clinton’s emails. With every breath, he accused her of breaking the law by setting up a private email server, blamed the FBI for not throwing her in jail, and demanded that all of her emails be made public. He even invited the Russians to hack into her system and retrieve the 30,000 missing emails so we could see them, too.

But now, as president, when it comes to his own emails, Trump’s singing a different tune. No sooner did he learn that special counsel Robert Mueller had obtained from the General Services Administration tens of thousands of emails sent and received by his own transition team than Trump called foul. 

{mosads}“It’s not looking good. My people were very upset,” Trump told reporters. Meanwhile, his attorneys accused Mueller of obtaining the emails illegally and demanded that they remain private.

Seriously? He thinks Robert Mueller doesn’t know the law, or would dare do anything not by the book? As special counsel, investigating possible collusion between members of the Trump team and Russian officials, Mueller has every right to access any related documents. That’s why he sought and received authority to raid Paul Manafort’s house early in the morning and seize his computers.

Not only that. In investigating the possibility of collusion, there’s no better potential treasure trove of evidence than the emails Trump’s team members were sending. Who were they communicating with? And what where they talking about? And besides, if the Trumpers were really not in contact with Russia, and if they were really not talking about rigging the election for Trump, they have nothing to worry about.

Let’s be honest. This is not a serious, nor stand-alone, complaint. This is but the latest phase in a continuing campaign by Donald Trump to discredit the Russia investigation — which, from the start, he’s dismissed as a “witch hunt” engineered by Democrats who still cannot accept the fact that he’s in the Oval Office and Hillary Clinton’s not.

At first, the administration said it welcomed the Mueller investigation as a chance to “clear the air” and would cooperate fully. 

But now that Mueller’s charged Paul Manafort, Richard Gates, George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn and appears to be closing in on the Oval Office, Trump’s lawyers are getting nervous. Anticipating more serious charges coming soon against top White House officials, and perhaps members of the president’s own family, Trump and his attorneys are mounting a deliberate campaign to destroy Mueller first.

Which is a classic Trumpian move, yet a total waste of time. When it comes to credibility, pitting Robert Mueller against Donald Trump is a joke. One’s the most-respected law enforcement official in the country, who served 12 years as director of the FBI. The other’s a political huckster who has yet to tell the truth about anything. Mueller has more credibility in his little finger than Trump has in his entire body.

Press is host of “The Bill Press Show” on Free Speech TV and author of “Buyer’s Remorse: How Obama Let Progressives Down.”