Mr. Barr could not be trusted, Judge Reggie B. Walton said,
citing “inconsistencies” between the attorney general’s statements about the
report when it was secret and its actual contents that turned out to be more
damaging to President Trump. Mr. Barr’s “lack of candor” called into question
his “credibility and, in turn, the department’s” assurances to the court, Judge
Walton said.
The judge ordered the Justice Department to privately
show him the portions of the report that were censored in the publicly released
version so he could independently verify the justifications for those
redactions. The ruling came in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking a
full-text version of the report.
The differences between the report and Mr. Barr’s
description of it “cause the court to seriously question whether Attorney
General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the
Mueller report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the
redacted version of the Mueller report to the contrary,” wrote Judge Walton, an
appointee of President George W. Bush.
Mr. Barr’s public rollout of the Mueller report has
been widely criticized. Still, it was striking to see a
Republican-appointed federal judge scathingly dissect Mr. Barr’s conduct in a
formal judicial ruling and declare that the sitting attorney general had so
deceived the American people that he could not trust assertions made by a
Justice Department under Mr. Barr’s control.
A department spokeswoman had no immediate comment. The
lawsuit centers on Freedom of Information requests by the Electronic Privacy
Information Center and by Jason Leopold, a BuzzFeed News reporter.
Judge Walton’s decision focuses on the period last spring
between the delivery of the Mueller report to the attorney general, his
publicly issued summary of it two days later that drew widespread condemnation
and the release of the report itself a month later that revealed several
discrepancies between the documents.
Among those Judge Walton cited: Mr. Barr’s obfuscation about
the scope of the links that investigators found between the Trump campaign and
Russia, and how the report documented numerous episodes that appear to meet the criteria for
obstruction of justice, echoing the complaints of many critics of Mr.
Barr’s summary of the report.
The attorney general issued an initial four-page letter in
March 2019 — two days after receiving the 381-page Mueller report — that
purported to summarize its principal conclusions. But within days, Mr. Mueller
sent letters to Mr. Barr protesting that he had distorted its findings and asking him
to swiftly release the report’s own summaries. Instead, Mr. Barr made the
report public only weeks later, after a fuller review to black out sensitive
material.
Among the issues Judge Walton flagged: Mr. Barr declared
that the special counsel had not found that the Trump campaign had conspired or
coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 presidential
election, and left it at that.
But while Mr. Mueller did conclude that he found
insufficient evidence to charge any Trump associates with conspiring with the
Russians, Mr. Barr omitted that the special counsel had identified multiple
contacts between Trump campaign officials and people with ties to the Russian
government and that the campaign expected to benefit from Moscow’s
interference.
Judge Walton also wrote that the special counsel “only
concluded” that the investigation did not establish that the contacts rose to
“coordination” because Mr. Mueller interpreted that term narrowly, requiring,
in the report’s words, agreement that is “more than the two parties taking
actions that were informed by or responsive to the other’s actions or
interests.”
In addition, Mr. Barr told the public in March that Mr.
Mueller had made no decision about whether the president obstructed justice,
then pronounced Mr. Trump cleared of those suspicions.
But Mr. Barr “failed to disclose to the American public,”
Judge Walton wrote, that Mr. Mueller had explained that it would be
inappropriate to make a judgment while the president was still in office about
whether he committed obstruction crimes. The report also said that if the
evidence had cleared Mr. Trump, Mr. Mueller would have said so, but he was
unable to exonerate him.
“The speed by which Attorney General Barr released to the
public the summary of Special Counsel Mueller’s principal conclusions, coupled
with the fact that Attorney General Barr failed to provide a thorough
representation of the findings set forth in the Mueller report, causes the
court to question whether Attorney General Barr’s intent was to create a
one-sided narrative about the Mueller report — a narrative that is clearly in
some respects substantively at odds with the redacted version of the Mueller
report,” Judge Walton wrote.
The judge also blasted similar “inconsistencies” in public comments made by Mr. Barr hours before he released
the redacted version of the report in April.
Because of that pattern, Judge Walton wrote, he could not
look away from the fact that the portions of the Mueller report that the
Justice Department was withholding in the Freedom of Information Act case
mirrored the deletions made under Mr. Barr’s guidance in the version of the
report released in April.
That echoing, he wrote, causes “the court to question
whether the redactions are self-serving and were made to support, or at the
very least to not undermine, Attorney General Barr’s public statements and
whether the department engaged in post-hoc rationalization to justify Attorney
General Barr’s positions.”
Appointed to the Federal District Court bench in Washington
in 2001, Judge Walton has presided over a variety of high-profile
cases, including the perjury trial of the former baseball pitcher Roger
Clemens and the trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr., the onetime chief of staff to Vice
President Dick Cheney who
was convicted of lying in connection with the leak of the identity of
a C.I.A. operative. Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Libby in 2018.
A former prosecutor who handled drug and street crime cases,
Judge Walton is known for handing down tough sentences and for being careful
and methodical. He also once broke up a street brawl near the courthouse.
The Mueller ruling was not the first time that Judge Walton
had criticized the actions of the Barr Justice Department. Last month, he
unsealed the transcript of a September closed-door meeting with
prosecutors about whether and when the department was going to charge
Andrew G. McCabe, the former acting F.B.I. director whom Mr. Trump has vilified
for his role in the Russia case, in connection with a leak investigation.
Noting in that September hearing that prosecutors had said
to him weeks earlier that a decision about charging Mr. McCabe could come
“literally within days,” Judge Walton chastised them for stringing along Mr.
McCabe and noted the president’s comments about Mr. McCabe with disapproval,
saying they created the appearance of a “banana republic.”
“I don’t think people
like the fact that you got somebody at the top basically trying to dictate
whether somebody should be prosecuted,” the judge said, adding that even if Mr.
Trump’s moves were “not influencing the ultimate decision, I think there are a
lot of people on the outside who perceive that there is undue, inappropriate
pressure being brought to bear.”
Nevertheless, the Justice Department continued to keep Mr.
McCabe hanging for another five months, announcing only last month that he would not be charged. Hours later, Judge Walton
unsealed the transcript of the closed September hearing, which was part of a
Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the liberal watchdog group Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
To read more CLICK HERE
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment