A federal appeals court ruling found that former Attorney General Bill Barr improperly withheld portions of a March 2019 memo he said he relied on to determine whether Trump should be prosecuted. The memo has been at the center of a legal battle for more than a year, after the Washington advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) fought for its release in a public records lawsuit. In May 2021, US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ordered the release of the entire memo and accused Mr. Barr and the Justice Department of misleading the court and the public. The Biden administration appealed that decision, and on Friday a three-judge appeals panel found that the administration could not stop the release under the Freedom of Information Act. Citizens for Ethics celebrated the decision and promised to release the non-editorial memo. Big news today: We won! We get the secret memo Barr used to undermine the Mueller report and not charge Trump with obstruction of justice. And you better believe we’re going to publicize it. — Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) August 20, 2022 “We won,” he tweeted on Friday. “And you better believe we’re going to make it public.” Former Attorney General William Barr (Associated Press) He accused Republicans of hypocrisy over their calls for the Justice Department to release all its documents related to the Mar-a-Lago investigation. Mr Barr had initially argued that the 2019 memo should be shielded from the public as it included the private discussions of his lawyers before a decision was made official. Barr used the memo to conclude that Trump did not obstruct the special counsel’s investigation led by Mueller into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. He released a controversial summary of the report, announced that Trump had been exonerated and refused to release the full report until weeks later, amid cries of outrage from Democrats. A year later, in March 2020, a judge issued a revealing ruling on Mr. Barr’s actions, saying he had made “misleading public statements” to spin the investigation’s findings in favor of the former president, according to the Associated Press. Friday’s ruling by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals noted that Mr. Mueller had declined to indict or acquit Mr. Trump of the obstruction charge and left the decision to Mr. Barr. Sitting presidents are considered immune from criminal prosecution on the grounds that their prosecution would undermine their ability to carry out their duties. But since he was no longer in office, there was no justification for him to continue to keep the memo secret, the court found.
