Watchdog pushes back on DOJ effort to block release of Trump obstruction memo

A watchdog group fighting in court for the release of a Trump-era Department of Justice (DOJ) legal memo called for its “immediate disclosure” on Friday, blasting the Biden administration for seeking to keep it under wraps.

The liberal group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed its opposition to the Justice Department’s motion to stay a federal judge’s order to release the document, which laid out the legal rationale for essentially clearing former President Trump of wrongdoing in relation to the special counsel investigation.

The DOJ said this week it would be appealing the order from District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, though it apologized in response to her accusations that former Attorney General William Barr had been “disingenuous” and asked her to stay her decision while it filed an appeal.

In a brief filed on Friday, CREW accused the DOJ of seeking to protect its “parochial interest in preventing embarrassing information from becoming public that would cast the agency and individual agency actors in a bad light.”

“By contrast, continuing to deprive the public of critical information to evaluate the conduct of former Attorney General Barr and former President Trump, who still plays an outsize role on the political stage and has yet to be held accountable for his many misdeeds in and since leaving office, would cause harm to Plaintiff and the public,” the court filing reads. “Under any analysis, the public interest in disclosure outweighs any interest DOJ has in continuing to keep this information secret.”

The Justice Department revealed its intention to appeal Jackson’s decision this week.

“In retrospect, the government acknowledges that its briefs could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused,” the DOJ said in a court filing Monday.

The decision disappointed Trump critics and Democrats in Congress who had called on the new administration not to block the document’s release following Jackson’s blistering decision earlier this month.

CREW filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in 2019, seeking to obtain a memo prepared for Barr, that is said to lay out the reasoning for the former attorney general’s conclusion that the conduct described in the report from former special counsel Robert Mueller did not support obstruction of justice charges against Trump.

Jackson had accused the DOJ of misrepresenting the Mueller report’s conclusions to the public in 2019 during the brief period after it had been submitted to the department but before it had been released to Congress. She also criticized the department’s attorneys for misrepresenting the memo in a way that would support keeping it out of public view.

“The agency’s redactions and incomplete explanations obfuscate the true purpose of the memorandum, and the 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 judge wrote.