The Department of Justice improperly shielded portions of a memo to Attorney General William Barr that concerned whether former President Trump obstructed a special counsel probe into his campaign's dealings with Russia during the 2016 presidential election, a federal appeals court has ruled.
The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit affirmed a federal judge's May 2021 decision that the DOJ had improperly redacted parts of the Trump-era legal memo that should have been made public as part of a government watchdog's records request lawsuit.
The memo at issue was prepared at Barr's request by the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel in March 2019, ostensibly to provide legal advice that would go on to guide Barr's decision not to charge Trump with obstruction of justice related to his alleged interference with former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into his 2016 campaign's contacts with Moscow.
The DOJ, responding to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking disclosure of the memo, argued that virtually the entire memorandum and related records should be shielded under a FOIA exemption that protects internal government deliberations.
But the D.C. Circuit Court panel on Friday, affirming the lower court's decision, ruled that the DOJ had failed to prove that the so-called deliberative-process privilege justified keeping the records under wraps.
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