Cummings Issues Statement in Response to

Letter from Trump Transition Team

Washington, D.C (Dec. 17, 2017)—Today, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, the Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, issued the following statement in response to a letter sent to the Oversight Committee and the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee suggesting that the General Services Administration should not have complied with requests from the Office of Special Counsel Robert Mueller to produce documents and communications from the Trump Transition Team:

“Our Committee has direct jurisdiction over the Presidential Transition Act, and it simply does not support withholding transition team emails from criminal investigators.  The President’s lawyers have said they want to fully comply with Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation, so it is odd that they now suggest they would have withheld key documents from federal investigators.”

According to the letter from the transition team lawyers, the Trump Administration General Services Administration produced documents to the Trump Administration Justice Department, and the emails at issue were from before Donald Trump was even sworn in as President and could have asserted executive privilege.

Today’s complaints from the transition team follow its previous refusal to cooperate with oversight requests from the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) in response to congressional requests.

In a report released on October 10, 2017, GAO stated, “We contacted the Office of the Vice President because Vice President Pence also served as the Chairman of the Trump-Pence Transition Team.  The Office of the Vice President did not respond to our request to discuss this work.”

GAO also reported that it “contacted the Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer of the Trump-Pence Transition Team,” but they also “declined our request for an interview.”