The Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr improperly withheld portions of an internal memo that Barr cited in announcing publicly that then-President Donald Trump had not committed obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation, a federal panel said Friday. of appeals.
The department had argued that the 2019 memorandum represented the private deliberations of its own attorneys before any decision was finalized 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 it, prompting an appeal last year by the Biden administration to a higher court.
Lawyers for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on the ruling. The department can appeal the ruling to the full court.
The case involves a March 24, 2019 memo from the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and another senior department official that was prepared for Barr to assess whether the Evidence in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation could support an obstruction-of-justice prosecution of the president.
Barr has said he relied on that opinion to conclude that Trump did not unlawfully obstruct the Russia investigation.
The Justice Department provided other documents to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington as part of the group’s lawsuit, but refused to release the memo. Government attorneys said they were entitled under public records law to withhold the memo because it reflected internal deliberations among attorneys before a formal decision was reached on what Mueller’s evidence showed.
But US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said last year that those claims were false because the memo was prepared for Barr around the same time as a separate letter from the Justice Department informing Congress and the public that Barr and other top leaders of the department concluded that Trump had not obstructed justice.
She said the memo therefore could not have been “predecisional” in nature if the Justice Department had already decided there would not be an obstruction case.
The administration said it had, in fact, already concluded that there would be no prosecution for obstruction, since the Justice Department’s legal opinions say a sitting president cannot be impeached. But he said the memo addressed a separate issue: whether the evidence Mueller had collected could support a conclusion that Trump had obstructed justice.
In its ruling on Friday, the appeals panel wrote that if Justice Department officials had made it clear to the court that the memo related to Barr’s decision to make a public statement about the report, the rulings in the case could have been different.
“Because the Department failed to link the memorandum to deliberations on the relevant decision, the Department failed to justify its reliance on the privilege of the deliberative process,” according to the ruling, from an unsigned panel of judges of the US Court of Appeals. Circuit of the District of Columbia.
Barr and other top officials concluded that Trump’s actions did not amount to obstruction, and the attorney general shared that assessment with Congress shortly after the memo was completed. Mueller’s team did not reach a conclusion on whether Trump had obstructed justice.
The appellate judges also noted that their decision was “narrow” and said it should not be construed as “challenging any of our precedents that allow agencies to withhold draft documents related to public messages.”