Barr accused of misleading court on Trump

The shuffling Washington politics that keep popping up in the news has revealed that a federal judge has accused the Justice Department and then-Attorney General William P. Barr of misleading the court and public, to hide how he decided that President Donald Trump should not be charged with obstructing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s Russia investigation.

District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of Washington ordered the release of a 2019 memo prepared by the department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Barr and a string of Justice Department officials sought to keep the memo secret, asserting it was part of the department’s internal decision-making process, before he selectively announced the Mueller report’s findings during March of that year.

Jackson wrote in a blistering opinion, after viewing the memo and other evidence, that the department’s claims “are so inconsistent with evidence in the record they are not worthy of credence.”

In a 35-page opinion ordering the memo’s release in a public records lawsuit, Jackson called suspicions that Barr and department lawyers had been disingenuous in withholding the document “well-founded” by the department, which had sought to obfuscate its true purpose of justifying a decision that had already been made.

Barr’s four-page letter to Congress in March 2019, said the special counsel did not draw a conclusion as to whether Trump obstructed the investigation and that Barr’s own opinion was that the evidence was insufficient to bring such a charge.

In reality, Mueller’s report laid out evidence of obstruction, but said the special counsel could not fairly make a charging decision, given department policy that a sitting president cannot be indicted.

Writing in March 2020, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton called Barr’s public statement “misleading” and said he had “grave concerns about the objectivity of the process” that led up to the public release of the Mueller report.

“The court cannot reconcile certain public representations made by Attorney General Barr’s lack of candor specifically, calling into question AG Barr’s credibility.

“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 concluded.

She was deeply familiar with the special counsel’s work, overseeing its prosecution in Washington, of former 2016 Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and the trial of the then-president’s political confidant Roger Stone.

Stone was convicted of lying and threatening a witness in Congress’s Russia investigation and Manafort pleaded guilty to tax and fraud charges related to his secret lobbying for politicians in Ukraine. Jackson sentenced both, before each was pardoned by Trump last year.