The US Department of Justice under Attorney General Merrick Garland will appeal a court order to release a memo that Trump Attorney General William Barr claimed he used for his legal basis for not charging Donald Trump with obstruction of justice, MSNBC News is reporting.
During the investigation into the Trump campaigns work with the Russian government to swing the 2016 election to Trump, Robert Mueller noted ten separate incidents in which Trump himself attempted to obstruct the course of justice by blocking or fabricating evidence. Barr, in testimony to Congress, said that he decided not to charge Trump based on recommendation from Robert Mueller, although the Mueller report made it very clear he did not view the duty of the investigation to determine whether or not Trump would be charged.
On May 5th, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of Washington, DC said that the Barr statement was disingenuous and that it should be released unredacted. “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,” Jackson wrote in a 35-page opinion in which she said Barr had already made his decision prior to reading Mueller’s report.
The statement of the appeal was filed just 90 minutes prior to the deadline to file a notice of appeal. It’s not unusual for one Administration to attempt to protect the internal deliberations of a previous Administration, knowing that the standard could apply to themselves in the future. However, the decision to appeal the court order will come under question by those demanding transparency about the Trump Administration’s decisions during Trump’s first impeachment and in the Russian election meddling investigation.
The memo, written by the Trump-era Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, was used as justification by Barr and other Justice officials to not charge Trump for his actions during the investigation. One of those acts was to demand then-White House Counsel Don McGahn to write a fraudulent note to file that Trump did not request the Justice Department to fire Robert Mueller.
Monday, McGahn agreed to honor a subpoena issued during the investigation about his knowledge on Trump’s obstruction efforts. Trump, while president, had blocked his staff from answering subpoenas, but the Biden White House, the Justice Department and the House staff worked out an agreement to get McGahn’s testimony.