AS USUAL, THE AMERICAN PUBLIC IS ALWAYS THE LAST TO KNOW THE TRUTH

 

… William P. Barr, the former U.S. Attorney General misled the American public

 

We now know that the president should have been charged with a crime

As usual, when it comes to the Republicans and telling the truth, the public will always be the last to know the real truth.

This is with regards to not charging the former President Trump with obstruction, due to the Robert S. Mueller III report, about whether Trump conspired with the Russians to interfere in the 2016 election.

The Justice Department has now released the part of a key internal document used in 2019 to justify not charging President Donald Trump with obstruction.  The document also signaled that it would fight a judge’s effort to make the entire document public, early in Trump’s term.

This federal judge has found that claims made by the justice department to try to shield the memo from public scrutiny “are so inconsistent with the evidence in the record, they are not worthy of credence,” and the judge said the department sought to “obfuscate” that it had set out to create a legal justification for a decision the justice department leaders had already made, to not accuse the president of a crime.

The filing comes after the federal judge excoriated the former U.S. Attorney General, William P. Barr, and the Justice Department more broadly, for their explanations of how and why it decided not to pursue a criminal case against Trump over possible obstruction of the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller.

The Justice Department filing is likely to both fuel and frustrate Trump’s biggest critics, particularly the Democrats who have long argued that Barr stage-managed an exoneration of Trump after Mueller submitted his 448-page report.  The report was into Mueller’s findings about his investigation into whether the 2016 Trump campaign conspired with Russia to interfere in the election, and whether Trump tried to obstruct that investigation.

The central document at issue is a March 2019 memo written by two senior Justice Department officials arguing that aside from important constitutional reasons not to accuse the president of a crime, the evidence gathered by Mueller did not rise to the level of a prosecutable case, even if Trump were not president.

Earlier this month, the federal U.S. District Judge, Amy Berman Jackson issued a scathing opinion saying that she had read the memo and that it showed that Barr was disingenuous when he cited the document as key to his conclusion that Trump had not broken the law.

She also accused department lawyers of misleading her about the internal discussions that surrounded the memo and ordered the memo be released, though she gave the government several weeks to decide whether to appeal.

As that deadline neared, the government filed papers seeking both to appeal the ruling and to appease the court by offering a partially unredacted version of the document.  They made the first two pages public, while filing an appeal to try to keep the other half-dozen pages secret.

“In retrospect, the government acknowledges that its briefs could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused. But the government’s counsel and declarants did not intend to mislead the Court,” the Justice Department lawyers wrote in asking the judge to keep the rest of the document under seal while they appeal her ruling.

The parts of the memo just released, offered a deeper glimpse into why the judge was angry.  It also indicated that the decision not to accuse Trump of a crime had been the subject of previous conversations among Justice Department leaders.

The memo written by Steven A. Engel, then the head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), and Edward O’Callaghan, then a senior department official closely involved in supervising the Mueller investigation, was addressed to Barr, then the U.S. Attorney General.

“Over the course of the Special Counsel’s investigation, we have previously discussed these issues within the Department among ourselves, with the Deputy Attorney General, and with you since your appointment, as well as with the Special Counsel and his staff. Our conclusions are the product of those discussions, as well as our review of the Report,” the lawyers wrote in the newly public section.

Robert Mueller had officially complained to Bill Barr about his summary of Muller’s report.

For decades, Justice Department policy has held that sitting presidents could not be charged with a crime.  But the memo also argued that the Justice Department should make a decision whether Trump broke the law.  Mueller had very carefully avoided answering that question, citing Justice Department policy against charging a sitting president.  “The department should reach a conclusion on whether prosecution is warranted,” the memo said. “The department either brings charges or it does not. . . . That principle does not change simply because the subject of the investigation is the president.”

For that reason, Engel and O’Callaghan urged Barr “to determine whether prosecution would be appropriate given the evidence recounted in the Special Counsel’s Report, the underlying law, and traditional principles of federal prosecution.”

Barr ultimately did so, making public arguments about Mueller’s evidence that closely tracked the views expressed in the memo.

Judge Jackson’s opinion noted that Barr told Congress that he and his deputy reached the decision that Trump should not be charged “in consultation” with the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and other department lawyers. Barr testified about the deliberations after Mueller wrote a private letter complaining to the Attorney General that his description of Mueller’s report before its public release “had led to a misunderstandings about what the investigation found”.

“The Attorney General’s characterization of what he’d hardly had time to skim, much less, study closely, prompted an immediate reaction, as politicians and pundits took to their microphones and Twitter feeds to decry what they feared was an attempt to hide the ball,” Judge Jackson wrote.

The OLC is a critical but little-known part of the federal government, providing legal advice to presidents and their administrations. Democratic and Republican administrations often cite OLC memos as the legal justification for controversial policy decisions, but the contents of such memos are usually closely held secrets within the government.

In the case of the memo regarding whether Trump could be charged with a crime, the judge’s opinion concluded that, rather than Barr following OLC advice, his decision and the OLC memo “were being written by the very same people at the very same time,” working “hand in hand to craft the advice” that the office “supposedly” delivered to Barr.

“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,” Judge Jackson concluded.

The basic truth the judge is trying to say in plain English is that the Attorney General, William Barr, misled the public when he decided that the president should not be charged for obstruction.

As I had said, the U.S. public is always the last to know the truth.

Copyright G. Ater 2021