He argued it was in the public interest for the investigation, including interviews of witnesses, to go forward unhindered.Īs the hearing kicked off, a small caravan of vehicles with Trump flags drove past the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach, Florida. Unsealing it, he said, would provide a “road map” of the investigation - which is in its “early stages” - and expose the next steps to be taken by federal agents and prosecutors. Jay Bratt, a top Justice Department national security prosecutor, had argued that the affidavit should remain hidden from the public.

Those documents showed the FBI was specifically investigating the “willful retention of national defense information,” the concealment or removal of government records and obstruction of a federal investigation. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.In addition to ordering the redactions, the judge agreed to make public other documents, including the warrant’s cover sheet, the Justice Department’s motion to seal the documents and the judge’s order requiring them to be sealed. “Because the Department did not tie the memorandum to deliberations about the relevant decision, the Department failed to justify its reliance on the deliberative-process privilege,” wrote the panel of judges from the U.S.

Had Justice Department officials made clear to the court that the memo related to Barr's decision on making a public statement about the report, the appellate panel wrote, rulings in the case might have been different.

The Justice Department, like Mueller, “took as a given that the Constitution would bar the prosecution of a sitting President,” the appeals court wrote, which meant the decision that Trump wouldn't be charged had already been made and couldn't be shielded from public release. Sitting presidents are generally protected from criminal charges on grounds it would undermine their ability to perform the office's constitutional duties. Government lawyers said they were entitled under public records law to withhold the memo because it reflected internal deliberations before any formal decision had been reached on what Mueller’s evidence showed. The Justice Department turned over other documents to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington as part of the group’s lawsuit, but declined to give it the memo. A federal judge previously disagreed, ordering the Justice Department to provide it to a government transparency group that had sued for it.Īt issue in the case is a March 24, 2019, memorandum from the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and another senior department official that was prepared for Barr to evaluate whether evidence in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation could support prosecution of the president for obstruction of justice.īarr has said he looked to that opinion in concluding that Trump did not illegally obstruct the Russia probe, which was an investigation of whether his campaign had colluded with Russia to tip the 2016 election.Ī year later, a federal judge sharply rebuked Barr’s handling of Mueller's report, saying Barr had made “misleading public statements” to spin the investigation’s findings in favor of Trump and had shown a “lack of candor.”įriday's appeals court decision said the internal Justice Department memo noted that “Mueller had declined to accuse President Trump of obstructing justice but also had declined to exonerate him.” The internal memo said “the Report’s failure to take a definitive position could be read to imply an accusation against President Trump” if released to the public, the court wrote. The department had argued that the 2019 memo represented private deliberations of its lawyers before any decision was formalized, and was thus exempt from disclosure. The Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr improperly withheld portions of an internal memo Barr cited in announcing that then-President Donald Trump had not obstructed justice in the Russia investigation, a federal appeals panel said Friday.

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