On Friday, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled the Department of Justice (DOJ) improperly withheld a memo to Attorney General William Barr that concerned whether former President Trump obstructed special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into his campaign’s dealings with Russia during the 2016 presidential election.
“The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed a federal judge’s May 2021 decision that the DOJ had improperly redacted parts of the Trump-era legal memo that should have been made public as part of a government watchdog’s records request lawsuit,” The Hill reports.
The memo was prepared for Barr to evaluate whether evidence in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation warranted prosecution of Trump for obstruction of justice.
“The Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr improperly withheld portions of an internal memorandum Barr cited in publicly announcing that then-President Donald Trump had not obstructed justice in the Russia investigation,” the judges said according to the report.
The department had argued that the 2019 memo represented the private deliberations of its own lawyers before any decision had been formalized, and was therefore exempt from disclosure.
But U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said last year that those arguments were disingenuous because the memo was prepared for Barr at about the same time as a separate Justice Department letter informing Congress and the public that Barr and other senior department leaders concluded that Trump had not obstructed justice.
The memo noted that “Mueller had declined to accuse President Trump of obstructing justice but also had declined to exonerate him” and “recommended that Barr ‘reach a judgment’ on whether the evidence constituted obstruction of justice,” the panel wrote Friday.
Read the full report at The Hill.
