Mueller asks WH staff to preserve all documents relating to June 2016 meeting

[HAB911]

(CNN)Special counsel Robert Mueller has asked the White House to preserve all documents relating to the June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower that Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort had with a Russian lawyer and others, according to a source who has seen the letter.

Mueller sent a notice, called a document preservation request, asking White House staff to save "any subjects discussed in the course of the June 2016 meeting" and also "any decisions made regarding the recent disclosures about the June 2016 meeting," according to the source, who read portions of the letter to CNN.
The letter from Mueller began: "As you are aware the Special Counsel's office is investigating the Russian government's efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election, including any links or coordination between the Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of Donald Trump. Information concerning the June 2016 meeting between Donald J Trump Jr and Natalia Veselnitskaya is relevant to the investigation."

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/21/politics/robert-mueller-russia-investigation-trump-tower-meeting/index.html?CNNPolitics=Tw

[Dave Starsky]

1. Which means he already has what he needs.

The cardinal rule of prosecutors is that you never ask a defendant a question to which you don't already know the answer.

[sunonmars]

2. This x 1000, guarantee he has the tax returns already too.

[Ms. Toad]

4. That is NOT what it means.

Document preservation letters are intended to:

*Affirmatively preserve documents

*Stop the routine destruction of documents pursuant to a document retention policy (if documents are routinely destroyed after a certain period of time, until you receive a document retention letter it is perfectly legal to continue to purge them on your normal time table, even if you are concerned about potential litigation - until you get a document retention letter)

*Set the trigger for evidentiary presumptions (i.e. the destroyed documents contained adverse content), if #2 is ignored.

You don't wait until you have all of the answers to send a preservation letter, becuase if you do - you lose the benefit of documents destroyed in the ordinary course of things (because they can be legitimately destroyed), and you lose the punitive presumption that if you destroyed it after the preservation letter, it is presumed to be bad for you. The longer you wait, the more you lose.

[Astroman]

3. good