The Department of Justice on Wednesday released a 2019 memo signed by former Attorney General William Barr not to prosecute former President Donald Trump for obstruction of justice stemming from Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.
Initially, the Justice Department released a redacted version of the memo in May 2021, but on Friday, a panel of judges in the D.C. Circuit ordered the release of the whole memo, which they cited Barr as wrongly withholding key parts of the internal memo when he announced the findings of the Russia investigation.
According to the Washington Examiner, on Friday, the watchdog group which sued for the release of the full document, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, celebrated.
"We won," the group tweeted. "We're going to get the secret memo Barr used to undercut the Mueller Report and claim it was insufficient to find Trump obstructed justice. And we're going to make it public."
As noted by journalist Jason Leopold, one key passage appearing on the seventh page reads: "The conduct under investigation is based entirely upon 'directions' by the President to subordinates to take actions on his behalf that they did not undertake."
Before the release of Mueller's report in April 2019, Barr sent a summary letter to Congress, which stated that the special counsel did not find evidence establishing a criminal conspiracy and did not come to a determination on whether to charge Trump with obstruction of Justice. Barr said he and former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein concluded that it was insufficient to establish criminality on that front.
In March 2019, Barr said that "to obtain an obstruction conviction, the government would need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a person, acting with corrupt intent, engaged in obstructive conduct with a sufficient nexus to a pending or contemplated proceeding." Barr added that Trump's actions, "many of which took place in public view," did not meet those conditions.
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