The federal judge who reviewed the full, unredacted report by special counsel Robert Mueller said he has questions about the reasoning for the Justice Department’s redactions and ordered the agency to provide the court with answers.
“Having reviewed the unredacted version of the Mueller Report, the Court cannot assess the merits of certain redactions without further representations from the Department,” Judge Reggie Walton said in a court order this week.
Walton, an appointee of President George W. Bush, said earlier this year that he had “grave concerns about the objectivity of the process that preceded the public release of the redacted version of the Mueller Report” and its “impacts on the Justice Department’s subsequent justifications” that its redactions of the report were authorized under the Freedom of Information Act. The Justice Department has consistently said it did not improperly conceal anything in the report.
The judge said in early March that he agreed with the Electronic Privacy Information Center and BuzzFeed, which sued for the report in its entirety under the Freedom of Information Act, that Attorney General William Barr had “dubiously handled the public release” of the Mueller report. And in late March, the Justice Department handed over a full, unredacted copy of Mueller’s report on Russian interference,
Walton said Monday that he “must discuss the substance of the redactions” with the Justice Department, but that the conversation “cannot occur remotely due to the lack of a secure connection between the Court and the Department necessary to avoid disclosure of the redacted information” and cannot immediately occur in-person due to social-distancing guidelines issued by D.C. District Court Chief Judge Beryl Howell related to the coronavirus pandemic.
The judge vacated the status conference that was scheduled for next week and instead ordered DOJ lawyers to appear before the court for an ex parte hearing on July 20 “to address the Court’s questions regarding certain redactions of the Mueller Report.”
Mueller’s report, released in April 2019, noted his investigation “identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign” and that Russia interfered in a “weeping and systematic fashion.” But the special counsel “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
On the issue of possible obstruction of justice, Mueller said he “determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the president committed crimes” but that, “while this report does not conclude that the president committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.” Barr and then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded that Trump had not obstructed justice.
In March, Walton said, “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.”
The judge added that it was “a narrative that is clearly in some respects substantively at odds with the redacted version of the Mueller Report.”
But DOJ spokeswoman Kerri Kupec pushed back a couple of days later, calling the court’s assertions “contrary to the facts.”
“The original redactions in the public report were made by Department attorneys, in consultation with senior members of Special Counsel Mueller’s team, prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Offices, and members of the Intelligence Community,” Kupec said. “In response to FOIA requests, the entire report was then reviewed by career attorneys, including different career attorneys with expertise in FOIA cases — a process in which the Attorney General played no role. There is no basis to question the work or good faith of any of these career Department lawyers.”
Kupec said the Justice Department “stands by” the work of the DOJ officials who made the redaction decisions and defended Barr’s “efforts to provide as much transparency as possible in connection with the Special Counsel’s confidential report.”
During a May 2019 news conference after the report’s release, Mueller offered some cover to Barr in explaining what transpired behind the scenes during the Justice Department’s redaction process.
“At one point in time, I requested that certain portions of the report be released,” Mueller said. “The attorney general preferred to make the entire report public all at once. We appreciate that the attorney general made the report largely public, and I certainly do not question the attorney general’s good faith in that decision.”
Walton isn’t the only one who has sought more information on the Mueller report, as the Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee has sued for access to the redacted grand jury information in the report, as well as the grand jury testimony underpinning the investigation, as part of what they say is an inquiry into impeachable offenses committed by Trump. The Justice Department has appealed to the Supreme Court in an effort to block the unredacted Mueller report from being handed over to the congressional committee.
