A federal judge rebuked Attorney General William Barr over his handling of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report.
In a Tuesday order, D.C. District Court Judge Reggie Walton second-guessed the redactions appearing in the 448-page report and demanded the Justice Department hand over an unredacted version so he could decide if more should be made public.
Walton, a President George W. Bush appointee, said, “The Court has grave concerns about the objectivity of the process that preceded the public release of the redacted version of the Mueller Report” as well as its “impacts on the Justice Department’s subsequent justifications” that its redactions of the report were authorized under the Freedom of Information Act.
The judge said he agreed with the Electronic Privacy Information Center and BuzzFeed, which sued for the report in its entirety under FOIA, that Barr had “dubiously handled the public release of the” Mueller report.
A DOJ representative did not immediately respond to the Washington Examiner‘s request for comment.
Walton specifically took issue with the March 2019 letters Barr wrote prior to the release of the Mueller report and an April 2019 letter and press conference the attorney general gave the morning the report was made public.
“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 wrote, adding that it was “a narrative that is clearly in some respects substantively at odds with the redacted version of the Mueller Report.”
The judge wrote, “The Court cannot reconcile certain public representations made by Attorney General Barr with the findings in the Mueller Report” and claimed the “inconsistencies” between Barr’s statements in the lead-up to the Mueller report’s release and the contents of the report itself “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.”
Mueller delivered his report to the Justice Department on March 22, and Barr informed Congress that day he was reviewing it and might be able to advise them of Mueller’s “principal conclusions” that weekend.
Barr told Congress on March 24 that Mueller’s investigation “did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election.” The attorney general also said Mueller “did not draw a conclusion one way or the other as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction.”
Mueller sent a letter on March 27, claiming Barr’s letter “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of his investigation’s “work and conclusions.”
Barr followed up with another letter on March 29 stating some media and public figures “mischaracterized” his prior letter as a “summary” of Mueller’s report and emphasized that it “was not and did not purport to be an exhaustive recounting” of Mueller’s investigation.
The attorney general stated at an April news conference that, “thanks to the special counsel’s thorough investigation, we now know that the Russian operatives who perpetrated these schemes did not have the cooperation of President Trump or the Trump campaign.”
Mueller’s report noted his investigation “identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign” but “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.”
Walton said on Thursday that Barr’s “lack of candor” called into question his “credibility.” The judge said he would “conduct an independent review of the unredacted version of the” Mueller report to see if the Justice Department blacked out too much.
