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Category: Amy Berman Jackson

  • DOJ Is Resisting Release of Barr Memo on Trump and Has Appealed Court Ruling

    President Donald Trump arrives as Attorney General William Barr looks on during a briefing at the White House on March 23, 2020, in Washington, D.C.

    The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday night appealed a decision from a district judge, made earlier this month, that would have required the department to release full details of a memo that former Attorney General William Barr had said helped him decide not to prosecute former President Donald Trump.

    The DOJ agreed to release the first page and half of the second page of that memo, but argued that attorney-client privilege would be violated if the remainder of the document was made public. The memo says that although special counsel Robert Mueller did not come to a conclusion on whether obstruction of justice charges should be brought against Trump in his report about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the Justice Department would not be making any such charges.

    Barr and other officials in the department had suggested the memo, which was crafted shortly after Mueller submitted his report in 2019, contained details of their deliberative process for choosing not to prosecute Trump. Following that DOJ assertion, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed an open records request demanding to see the memo.

    Earlier this May, D.C. Circuit Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that the Justice Department, now under Attorney General Merrick Garland’s watch, was disingenuous in its arguments against sharing the memo, as it had appeared to her that the document was not so much about making a decision to charge Trump or not but rather a justification for a decision that had already been made not to charge the former president.

    “The review of the document reveals that the Attorney General [Barr] was not then engaged in making a decision about whether the President should be charged with obstruction of justice; the fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given,” Jackson wrote in her opinion.

    Indeed, Barr was already briefing Congress on his decision not to charge Trump when the memo was being finalized by the department.

    The claims that the memo was a deliberative document over whether or not to charge Trump were therefore “so inconsistent with evidence in the record, they are not worthy of credence,” Jackson said in her opinion.

    The DOJ, in appealing Jackson’s decision, seemed to acknowledge that they used “language that was imprecise” when it came to their previous claims. But they also said that the mistake did not justify making the department’s “deliberative process” public.

    Freedom of Information Act requests can be denied by the government under some circumstances, the DOJ argued, including shielding government agencies from having to disclose how they make prosecutorial decisions. Those rules are “intended to protect the confidentiality of the government’s deliberative process,” they added.

    Jackson is giving CREW until Friday to issue a legal response to the appeal. CREW President Noah Bookbinder blasted the department’s refusal to release the document in full.

    “The Department of Justice had an opportunity to come clean, turn over the memo, and close the book on the politicization and dishonesty of the past four years,” Bookbinder said in a statement. “Last night it chose not to do so.”

    The DOJ’s appeal is “a position that is legally and factually wrong and that undercuts efforts to move past the abuses of the last administration,” Bookbinder added. “We will be fighting this in court.”

    Prior to the Mueller report being released, Barr had said that in his opinion, there wasn’t anything within the report that warranted prosecuting Trump. The former president used that announcement by his attorney general to suggest that he had been exonerated. However, after the report was made public, it was demonstrated that there were at least 10 actions taken by Trump that could have amounted to obstruction of justice.

    Mueller left it up to the DOJ and to Congress to act on that information if they chose to via possible impeachment proceedings. But in that eponymous report, Mueller also made it a point to note that Trump had not been exonerated by his findings.

    “If we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state,” the report said. “Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Judge Says DOJ Memo on Barr’s Decision Not to Charge Trump Must Be Released

    A federal judge has ruled that a redacted memo crafted by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2019 that DOJ lawyers said justified the department’s decision not to file obstruction of justice charges against former President Donald Trump must be made public.

    District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said on Monday that then-Attorney General William Barr and a cadre of lawyers and legal advisers who helped pen the memo had misled the public, then and now, over what its purpose had been.

    The DOJ had argued that the full memo should not be made public for government deliberation because of attorney-client privilege regarding what actions, if any, should be taken over conclusions arrived at in the Mueller report. The investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller examined whether Russia and the Trump campaign in 2016 had colluded with one another and whether Trump, or others within his campaign, had obstructed that inquiry. But Jackson rejected that argument because her own review of the memo found that Barr had not been forthright about how the document was conceived.

    “Not only was the Attorney General being disingenuous then, but DOJ has been disingenuous to this Court with respect to the existence of a decision-making process that should be shielded by the deliberative process privilege,” Jackson wrote in her opinion.

    Rather than being a document that sought to come to a conclusion on what to do, Barr and the DOJ had already determined what action was going to be taken. Privacy concerns that lawyers for the DOJ made about the deliberative process, then, were insincere.

    “The review of the document reveals that the Attorney General was not then engaged in making a decision about whether the President should be charged with obstruction of justice; the fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given,” Jackson explained.

    Lawyers’ arguments defending the right to keep the memo a secret didn’t match up with emails and other documents that were presented within the trial, the judge added. Claims by the DOJ “are so inconsistent with evidence in the record, they are not worthy of credence,” Jackson wrote.

    Indeed, while the memo was being finalized, Barr was already on Capitol Hill, briefing Congress on why he would not be pursuing charges against Trump.

    Jackson ruled that the DOJ has two weeks to decide whether to appeal her ruling or not. After that time, if no appeal is made, the document must be made public, without most of the redactions currently contained within.

    Jackson’s decision for the memo to be made public came about from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for the organization, explained that skepticism over Barr’s decision not to seek charges against Trump prompted the lawsuit.

    “We requested these records and filed this lawsuit due to serious doubts about the official story coming out of Barr’s DOJ,” Libowitz said. “While we do not yet know what is in the memo, the Court’s opinion gives us confidence that we were right to have questions.”

    Days after receiving the Mueller report in late March 2019, Barr issued a four-page letter to the public concluding that there wasn’t collusion between Trump’s campaign in 2016 and the Russian government, and further suggesting that the report contained no evidence to support charges of obstruction of justice. Trump used Barr’s letter to suggest he had received “complete and total exoneration” from Mueller’s investigation.

    In actuality, the Mueller report refused to make conclusions on what actions should be taken. Instead, the report outlined at least 10 instances by Trump that might amount to obstruction of justice, but left it to Congress to decide how to handle the matter afterward.

    In May 2019, Mueller, speaking for the first time publicly about the investigation that he led, reiterated that claims by Trump and his allies, saying that he was exonerated, were false. “If we had had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so,” Mueller said then.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.