Pierce writes: "Still, Judge Amy Berman Jackson's decision in a case tracing back to the Mueller Report - and Barr's spin on it - is an important one."
Bill Barr. (photo: AFP/Getty Images)
05 May 21
Still, Judge Amy Berman Jackson's decision in a case tracing back to the Mueller Report—and Barr's spin on it—is an important one.
o 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.
