Yeah, about those fake headlines from the Trump propaganda merchants, screaming that Robert Mueller’s team had illegally obtained Trump transition team emails – they’re a desperate twist on reality, at best, and outright lies, at worst.

And yes, the ones who have made it their click bait-y headlines, in hopes of roping the salivating Trump loyalists, looking for any reason to discredit the work already done by Robert Mueller, they know they’re twisting the truth.

Well, Mueller’s team is firing back today, defending themselves from the “fake news” that those who so often use the term as a pejorative seem to be most prone to spreading.

On Sunday, Mueller’s office released a statement:

 “When we have obtained emails in the course of our ongoing criminal investigation, we have secured either the account owner’s consent or appropriate criminal process,” Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counsel’s office, said in a statement to The Hill.

You mean you did it by the book?

Not everybody is as sloppy and disorganized as the current presidential administration – or their defenders – it would seem.

The whole kerfuffle began when Axios reported on Saturday that Mueller’s team had obtained tens of thousands of emails from Trump’s transition team, including those from Trump son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, and members of Trump’s foreign policy team and transition leadership.

Those emails were gathered and passed on the Mueller’s team by the General Services Administration, which was in charge of managing the transition team’s email accounts.

It was a lawyer for Trump’s transition team, Trump for America (TFA) that cried “Foul!” and fired off a desperate letter to several members of Congress.

Kory Langhofer accuses the GSA of “unlawfully produc[ing] TFA’s private materials, including privileged communications, to the Special Counsel’s Office,” according to Reuters.

Langhofer’s letter, which was sent to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, calls on the committees “to protect future presidential transitions from having their private records misappropriated by government agencies, particularly in the context of sensitive investigations intersecting with political motives.”

Notice that in the letter, Langhofer doesn’t accuse Mueller or his team of somehow breaking into the TFA’s system and stealing the emails.

There’s no claim of Mueller employing hackers or saying, “I love Wikileaks” before his team received the emails.

Nope. Langhofer specifically calls out government agencies and their practices.

I imagine with former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former foreign policy adviser/coffee boy George Papadopoulos, and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn all having been caught in the net by Mueller’s investigation, the heat is on other loyalists to create smoke screens.

Running headlines that suggest Mueller did anything inappropriate in obtaining those transition emails is just one more smoke screen.

It’s easier than the truth, I suppose.