A federal appeals court panel of judges ruled that the Department of Justice has illegally withheld a memo detailing deliberations former Attorney General Bill Barr referred to when explaining his rationale for not charging Donald Trump with obstruction of justice from a FOIA request by an independent government watchdog group, the Associated Press reports.

The case, which the Biden Administration took up, deals with the decision of the Barr Justice Department to hide details of the internal deliberations of top department lawyers and investigators who reviewed the Mueller report.  Barr referred to these deliberations frequently in Congressional oversight hearings seeking information on the reason Barr opted not to charge Trump after Special Counsel Robert Mueller detailed ten possible crimes Trump undertook in the course of the government’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The second half of Mueller’s report gave specific details and facts about the actions and directions Trump took to obstruct the investigation and obfuscate information sought by the Mueller team.  In his summary of the report to Congress, Barr claimed that Mueller recommended no charges be filed; in fact, Mueller wrote in the report that his job was simply to present facts and that the decision to charge would be up to the Attorney General. 

Repeatedly, Barr lied about the discussions he had with Mueller and other members of the Justice Department, including about deliberations about the various charges detailed in the Mueller report.  Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed multiple requests for various documents, which the Justice Department has turned over, but the DOJ has refused to turn over the memo outlining the deliberations on charging Trump, citing a concept similar to Executive Privilege:  the AG needs to be able to get unfettered opinions from his staff in order to consider options in a case, and the only thing that matters is the policy that springs out of the deliberations, as that is an official stance.

The court panel ruled, however, that prior to the release of the report, Mueller and the Justice Department had already decided that they would follow established practice that the DOJ could not legally indict a sitting president.  The Department had acknowledged previously that the document in question was unrelated to the decision to charge Trump; therefore, the deliberations immediately prior to the report’s release would not have directly dealt with that issue and the memo did not violate the deliberative exception to sharing department records.