Federal Judge Lambasts William Barr For Lying To The Court, Orders Memo To Be Released

Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in Washington, D.C. accused the Justice Department under Attorney General William P. Barr of misleading her and Congress about advice he had received from top department officials on whether President Donald J. Trump should have been charged with obstructing the Russia investigation and ordered that a related memo be released.

The New York Times reports, Judge Says Barr Misled on How His Justice Dept. Viewed Trump’s Actions:

Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in Washington, D.C. said in a ruling late Monday that the Justice Department’s obfuscation appeared to be part of a pattern in which top officials like Mr. Barr were untruthful to Congress and the public about the investigation.

The department had argued that the memo was exempt from public records laws because it consisted of private advice from lawyers whom Mr. Barr had relied on to make the call on prosecuting Mr. Trump. But Judge Jackson, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2011, ruled that the memo contained strategic advice, and that Mr. Barr and his aides already understood what his decision would be.

“The fact that he would not be prosecuted was a given,” Judge Jackson wrote of Mr. Trump.

She also singled out Mr. Barr for how he had spun the investigation’s findings in a letter summarizing the 448-page report before it was released, which allowed Mr. Trump to claim he had been exonerated.

“The attorney general’s characterization of what he’d hardly had time to skim, much less study closely, prompted an immediate reaction, as politicians and pundits took to their microphones and Twitter feeds to decry what they feared was an attempt to hide the ball,” Judge Jackson wrote.

Her rebuke shed new light on Mr. Barr’s decision not to prosecute Mr. Trump. She also wrote that although the department portrayed the advice memo as a legal document protected by attorney-client privilege, it was done in concert with Mr. Barr’s publicly released summary, “written by the very same people at the very same time.”

Judge Jackson said that the government had until May 17 to decide whether it planned to appeal her ruling, a decision that will be made by a Justice Department run by Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland.

The ruling came in a lawsuit by a government watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, asking that the Justice Department be ordered to turn over a range of documents related to how top law enforcement officials cleared Mr. Trump of wrongdoing.

At issue is how Mr. Barr handled the end of the Mueller investigation and the release of its findings to the public. In March 2019, the office of the special counsel overseeing the inquiry, Robert S. Mueller III, delivered its report to the Justice Department. In a highly unusual decision, Mr. Mueller declined to make a determination about whether Mr. Trump had illegally obstructed justice.

That opened the door for Mr. Barr to take control of the investigation. Two days after receiving the report, Mr. Barr sent a four-page letter to Congress saying that Mr. Trump would not be charged with obstructing justice and summarizing the report. Mr. Mueller’s team believed that Mr. Barr’s characterization of the document was misleading and privately urged him to release more of their findings, but Mr. Barr refused.

About a month later, around the time that the report was released to the public, Mr. Barr testified to Congress that he had made the decision not to charge Mr. Trump “in consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel and other department lawyers,” and that the decision to clear the president of wrongdoing had been left to Mr. Barr because Mr. Mueller had made no determination about whether Mr. Trump broke the law.

Judge Jackson said in the ruling that Mr. Barr had been disingenuous in those assertions, adding that it had not been left to him to make the decision about the prosecution.

She also said that in the litigation between the government and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the Justice Department under Mr. Barr had claimed that the memo, written by his top officials, had been about legal advice he had relied on to make the decision and should be shielded from the public.

Under federal law, the Justice Department can claim that such advice should be shielded because it is “deliberative” and the possibility of releasing it could keep advisers from giving their unvarnished counsel because they fear it may become public someday.

But instead, Judge Jackson wrote, Mr. Barr and his aides had already decided not to bring charges against Mr. Trump. She reprimanded the department for portraying the memo as part of deliberations over whether to prosecute the president. She noted that she had been allowed to read the full memo [in camera] before making her decision, over the objections of the Justice Department, and that it revealed that “excised portions belie the notion that it fell to the attorney general to make a prosecution decision or that any such decision was on the table at any time.”

The department “has been disingenuous to this court with respect to the existence of a decision-making process that should be shielded by the deliberative process privilege,” Judge Jackson wrote.

Sounds like a disciplinary referral to the bar is in order. The judge is saying that William Barr and his DOJ associate attorneys engaged in a lack of candor to the tribunal, Rule 3.3: Candor Toward the Tribunal:

a) A lawyer shall not knowingly:

(1) make a false statement of fact or law to a tribunal or fail to correct a false statement of material fact or law previously made to the tribunal by the lawyer;

(2) fail to disclose to the tribunal legal authority in the controlling jurisdiction known to the lawyer to be directly adverse to the position of the client and not disclosed by opposing counsel; or

(3) offer evidence that the lawyer knows to be false. If a lawyer, the lawyer’s client, or a witness called by the lawyer, has offered material evidence and the lawyer comes to know of its falsity, the lawyer shall take reasonable remedial measures, including, if necessary, disclosure to the tribunal. A lawyer may refuse to offer evidence, other than the testimony of a defendant in a criminal matter, that the lawyer reasonably believes is false.

The Judge is also intimating that William Barr overrode prosecutorial discretion, and took it upon himself to squelch any prosecution of Trump for obstruction of justice, by engaging in obstruction of justice himself. Just what you would expect a corrupt henchman to do.

Charles Pierce adds at Esquire, Most Americans Don’t Get to Be ‘Disingenuous’ Under Oath the Way Bill Barr Was:

To borrow a line from the late Laura Nyro, Federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson has a lot of patience, and that’s a lot of patience to lose. On Tuesday night, just as the working day was ending, Her Honor took every polite legal euphemism for the phrase, “lying your ass off” and she hung them all around the neck of former Attorney General William Barr, whose career as a White House legal henchman is now so firmly established that he fits neatly into a list of corrupt AGs with John Mitchell and Harry Daugherty.

Officially, Judge Jackson was ruling on a lawsuit brought by a Washington watchdog outfit that sought documents related to how the former president* ducked indictments arising out of Robert Mueller’s investigation. Jackson ordered the release of the documents, but she also took advantage of the opportunity to filet Barr before god and all the world.

To review: in March of 2019, Mueller delivered his final report into the involvement of Russian ratfckers with the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. Barr was the only one who had it. The AG almost immediately dispatched a letter to Congress. Judge Berman reminds us about what happened next.

The letter asserted that the Special Counsel “did not draw a conclusion – one way or the other – as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction,” and it went on to announce the Attorney General’s own opinion that “the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” The President then declared himself to have been fully exonerated…

On April 18, 2019, the Attorney General appeared before Congress to deliver the report. He asserted that he and the Deputy Attorney General reached the conclusion he had announced in the March 24 letter “in consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel and other Department lawyers.”

Judge Berman was having none of this. She ordered the release of the documents on the implied grounds that William Barr is not to be trusted as far as she can throw the E. Barrett Prettyman federal courthouse. She ruled that a vital memo should be released because it was not what Barr and the government claimed it was.

What the Court can say without revealing the content of the redacted material is that there were two sections to this memorandum. Section I offers strategic, as opposed to legal advice, about whether the Attorney General should take a particular course of action, and it made recommendations with respect to that determination, a subject that the agency omitted entirely from its description of the document or the justification for its withholding. This is a problem because Section I is what places Section II and the only topic the agency does identify – that is, whether the evidence gathered by the Special Counsel would amount to obstruction of justice – into its proper context.

Moreover, the redacted portions of Section I reveal that both the authors and the recipient of the memorandum had a shared understanding concerning whether prosecuting the President was a matter to be considered at all. In other words, 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.

The memo did not lay out legal options available to the DOJ. It was a blueprint for a spin strategy by which the Congress and the country would be misled about what Mueller really found on the matter of whether or not the former president* obstructed justice. It was part of a PR campaign, another burst of smoke and mirrors of the kind that has obscured the essential corruption of the former president*’s entire public career. William Barr was merely the latest incarnation of John Barron.

Of course, the flossy language employed in the decision is frustrating. The average American doesn’t get to be “disingenuous” under oath the way Barr was before Congress. (You may recall how then-Senator Kamala Harris put him on the spit and rotated him slowly over a low flame.) And it’s true that Mueller’s absurd interpretation of his whole mandate gave Barr plenty of running room for his campaign of disinformation and distraction. But there is something to be said for a judge whose patience is at an end. It can be…clarifying.

The most corrupt attorney general in the history of the United States should be facing a bar disciplinary proceeding for lying to the court. Disbar Barr.

On a related topic, remember the Steele Dossier? It turns out there was a second Steele Dossier. Second Steele dossier references claims of the existence of more Trump “sex tapes”: report

The former British spy who wrote a salacious dossier about Donald Trump also wrote a sequel document, according to a new report.

“The former MI6 spy Christopher Steele produced a second dossier for the FBI on Donald Trump while he was in the White House, sources told The Telegraph. Mr. Steele filed a series of intelligence reports to US authorities during the Trump presidency, including information concerning alleged sexual exploits,” the British newspaper reported Monday evening.

Mr. Steele’s continued involvement supplying intelligence to the FBI appears to give credibility to his original dossier, which sparked a special counsel investigation by prosecutor Robert Mueller into Russian interference into the 2016 US presidential elections,” the newspaper noted. “The second dossier contains raw intelligence that makes further claims of Russian meddling in the US election and also references claims regarding the existence of further sex tapes. The second dossier is reliant on separate sources to those who supplied information for the first reports.”

So are you telling me the Trump “yellow shower” video is for real? Or are we talking about the video of Trump engaging in sexual activities with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel at the 2013 Miss Universe contest?

The fact the FBI continued to receive intelligence from Mr. Steele, who ran MI6’s Russia desk from 2006 to 2009 before setting up Orbis, is potentially significant because it shows his work was apparently still being taken seriously after Mr. Trump took hold of the reins of power,” the newspaper explained. “The suggestion it includes further details of Mr. Trump’s sexual exploits will infuriate the former president. On Twitter, he has called the allegations a ‘pile of garbage.

Read the full report (subscription required).

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, “intelligence gathered by Steele for his second dossier is understood to include further details of Manafort’s alleged Russian contacts.”