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How Mueller Got Trump's Presidential Transition Team's Emails
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I question what influences our character.
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Special counsel Robert Mueller obtained
tens of thousands of emails sent and received by President Donald J.
Trump's presidential transition team. Trump's say these emails were
obtained without authorization, but the law seems to be on Mueller's
side. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)
In this area especially, the Fourth Amendment has been shot full of loopholes.
When there is a “reasonable expectation of privacy” the Fourth Amendment does offer some protection against unreasonable searches and seizures—meaning the government would have to go to a judge to obtain a warrant based on probable cause.
But in a situation such as this, where a third party holds the records, courts have found there is no reasonable expectation of privacy.
In 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, for example, ruled, in Rehberg v. Paulk, that a person does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy once any copy of the email is delivered to a third party—the GSA, in this case, is a third party.
Of course, every email sent over the Internet goes through third parties, so the Court was saying no email sent through an Internet service provider (ISP) is private. As the Fourth Amendment, along with the rest of the Bill of Rights, was passed as restrictions on the government, it’s a strange distinction to say they can get our data from a phone company or ISP without a warrant, but many courts haven’t seen it that way.
In this case, however, the GSA is saying they also informed the Trump presidential transition team that they would comply with any law-enforcement query.
