Court Rules Russia Memo Wrongly Withheld Under Barr
PBS reports
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 committed obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation, a federal appeals panel said Friday.
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. A federal judge previously disagreed, ordering the Justice Department to provide it to a government transparency group that had sued for it, prompting an appeal last year by the Biden administration to a higher court.
Attorneys for the Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to an email message seeking comment on the ruling. The department can appeal the ruling to the full court.
At issue in the case is a March 24, 2019, memorandum from the head of the Justice
Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, or OLC, and another senior department official that was prepared for Barr to evaluate whether evidence in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation could support an obstruction of justice prosecution of the president.
Barr has said that he looked to that opinion in concluding that Trump did not illegally obstruct the Russia probe.
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