William Barr’s effort to redeem himself is about to take a hit….
Robert Mueller’s action on this isn’t much better considering the legal actions against Donald Trump brewing now….
Barr simply was covering for a President that had done things he wasn’t supposed to do in holding back what info for the public….
The Department of Justice (DOJ) improperly shielded portions of a memo to Attorney General William Barr that concerned whether former President Trump obstructed a special counsel probe into his campaign’s dealings with Russia during the 2016 presidential election, a federal appeals court in Washington ruled on Friday.
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 memo at issue was prepared at Barr’s request by the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in March 2019, ostensibly to provide legal advice that would go on to guide Barr’s decision not to charge Trump with obstruction of justice related to his alleged interference with former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into his 2016 campaign’s contacts with Moscow.
The DOJ, responding to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit seeking disclosure of the memo, argued that virtually the entire memorandum and related records should be shielded under a FOIA exemption that protects internal government deliberations.
But the D.C. Circuit Court panel on Friday, affirming the lower court’s decision, ruled that the DOJ had failed to prove that the so-called deliberative-process privilege justified keeping the records under wraps.
The panel said the OLC memo did not in fact contain a legal analysis of whether Barr should pursue charges against Trump, but rather what, if anything, Barr should say to Congress and the public about Mueller’s voluminous findings…