Judge orders release of memo on Trump obstruction decision

A justice department memorandum explaining the decision not to charge Donald Trump with obstruction at the conclusion of the Mueller investigation must be made public, a federal judge has ruled.

Attorneys for the department were “disingenuous” in their attempts to keep the document secret, district court judge Amy Berman Jackson said, according to CNN which reported the story on Wednesday.

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The almost totally redacted memo, the lawyers had claimed, was legal reasoning that merely assisted William Barr, the then attorney general, to come to the decision not to charge the president for obstructing Mueller’s inquiry, and was therefore protected from public release.

But Barr’s decision not to charge Trump was predetermined, Jackson said in her 35-page opinion in a lawsuit brought in the US district of Columbia by the government transparency group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew).

“The agency’s redactions and incomplete explanations obfuscate the true purpose of the memorandum, and the excised portions belie the notion that it fell to the attorney general to make a prosecution decision or that any such decision was on the table at any time,” Jackson said in the opinion released Tuesday.

“The fact that [Trump] would not be prosecuted was a given,” she added.

The Mueller report did not establish collusion between the Trump administration and Russian officials, but found evidence of Russian election tampering. Mueller said evidence on obstruction was “inconclusive”, but Barr concluded that Trump had not stood in the special counsel’s way.

Jackson, who has previously questioned the Trump administration’s motives in keeping information secret, and who sentenced the Trump acolyte Roger Stone to 40 months in prison for crimes including lying to Congress, has been a frequent target of attacks by the former president, who subsequently commuted his long-time friend’s sentence.

The nine-page memo that Jackson ordered released was authored by Steven Engel of the office of legal counsel and Ed O’Callaghan, an adviser in the deputy attorney general’s office, according to CNN, which described them as “political leaders” in the justice department. It said the memo came out the same day Barr briefed Congress about Mueller’s findings on Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Department lawyers argued in court that much of the substance of the memo should stay blacked out because it was protected internal discussions, CNN said. A second, separate document, a draft legal analysis from the office of legal counsel, could remain secret, Jackson decided.

Crew officials welcomed Jackson’s ruling. “We requested these records and filed this lawsuit due to serious doubts about the official story coming out of Barr’s DoJ,” the group’s spokesman, Jordan 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.”

The two-year Mueller inquiry led to the indictment of 34 individuals and three Russian businesses on charges including conspiracy and lying to the FBI. A number of Trump associates were among those subsequently convicted and jailed, including Stone; Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chair; Gen Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser; and the ex-president’s long-serving personal attorney Michael Cohen.