The Department of Justice must release the memo used by former attorney general Bill Barr as the legal justification for not prosecuting Donald Trump over the alleged obstruction of justice he undertook during the Mueller investigation, a federal judge has determined, Politico reports.

US District Court judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered the DoJ to release the memo in a scathing opinion on Barr’s conduct, starting with Barr’s delay in releasing the Mueller report and instead issuing a claimed summary of the report, which did not match the actually findings of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

Barr’s summary stated that the Mueller investigation “did not draw a conclusion – one way or the other – as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction,” and that “the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.”  Both of those statements are contradicted by the actual findings of the Mueller report, which listed ten separate counts of obstruction Trump could have been prosecuted for.

Jackson says the Barr summary was not a summary of the Mueller report findings, but a statement made to rationalize not prosecuting Trump, a decision likely made before the investigation’s findings were complete.

“The review of the document reveals that the Attorney General was not then engaged in making a decision about whether the President should be charged with obstruction of justice; the fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given,” wrote Jackson.

The order to release the memo was made in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a non-partisan DC watchdog group.