The (Bloomberg) A federal appeals court ordered that the US Justice Department must make public a 2019 letter that provided guidance to then-attorney general Bill Barr on how to handle the Mueller investigation's conclusion and the department's decision not to indict Donald Trump.A Washington, DC, panel of appeals court judges ruled unanimously on Friday to maintain a lower court's ruling requiring the agency to make the March 2019 paper public after concluding that DOJ lawyers had misrepresented it from the beginning.
The district judge determined that the memo was not about whether the Justice Department was seriously examining whether to charge Trump, as she had been led to believe, but rather what kind of public statement Barr should make regarding the conclusions of special counsel Robert Mueller.At the conclusion of Mueller's inquiry into whether Trump attempted to obstruct the investigation and Russian intervention in the 2016 election, the memo to Barr was sent. Barr declared that the evidence was "inadequate" to bring charges against Trump after Mueller's team declined to recommend doing so.In "Public Messaging,"
In response to a public documents request by watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Justice Department had argued against making the whole Office of Legal Counsel's memo to Barr available (CREW). The department had argued that the memo was protected because it contained critical, pre-decision discussions about whether Trump might be charged with hindering the special counsel's investigation, according to a ruling by US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson last year.
Jackson agreed to keep the other portions of the memo under seal until the government filed an appeal after the department released a redacted version of it.However, it later became apparent that DOJ officials had planned to rely on long-standing department policy against prosecuting a sitting president, and the memo was instead about the department's "public messaging" over the Mueller report, as the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit noted in its decision on Friday.The decision was hailed by CREW as "a big victory for transparency."
Attorney General Barr used this document as justification for not prosecuting President Trump for obstructing the investigation, according to a statement from a spokeswoman, Jordan Libowitz. The people of America have a right to know what it says. They will now.
A Justice Department representative declined to offer any comments on the choice.Judges Judith Rogers and David Tatel joined Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan of the DC Circuit in stating that any analysis in the memo regarding filing obstruction charges was more akin to a "thought exercise."Although the department expressed "regret" for giving the false impression that a charging decision was being considered, Srinivasan claimed that it had missed opportunities to clarify the memo's genuine intent.
The government was denied a second opportunity to argue for the confidentiality of the entire letter by the court. According to Srinivasan, the Justice Department might have used the so-called "deliberative process privilege" to try to keep the memo secret if it had disclosed the memo's intent to be used for public messaging from the start, but it was already too late
Case number 21-5113, US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington v. US Department of Justice (Washington).
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