May 5, 2021 Share
A federal judge has ordered the release of a legal memorandum the Trump-era Justice Department prepared for then-Attorney General William Barr before he announced his conclusion that President Donald Trump had not obstructed justice during the Russia investigation.
The Justice Department had refused to give the March 24, 2019, memorandum to a government transparency group that requested it under the Freedom of Information Act, saying the document represented the private advice of lawyers and was produced before any formal decision had been made and was therefore exempt from disclosure under public records law.
But U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in a sharp rebuke of Barr, said the Justice Department had obscured “the true purpose of the memorandum” when it withheld the document.
Critics of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), which provides legal advice to the White House and Cabinet agencies, have long argued it acts as a rubber stamp for the president and essentially drafts laws behind closed doors. The judge s accusation this week that the OLC was tasked with clearing Trump s name is only likely to increase calls for reform and greater transparency.
Ethics and transparency advocates have been calling for the office to be reformed for years, and some are hoping that the latest revelation about how it operated during the Trump administration will provide some momentum.
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“If you think of the federal government like a private client, then they go to OLC like their private attorney to make the best arguments in favor of what they want,” said Erica Newland, counsel at Protect Democracy and a former OLC attorney who has spoken out against the Trump DOJ since leaving in 2018 after joining as a career attorney in 2016.
They’ll talk about change, about politics, about reform, about corruption, but they will never talk about war unless they mean something happening far away. Because to admit the existence of the war waged against us is to admit that we are combatants, and if we see that we are not fighting back, then we would have to admit that we have surrendered. That we have already been defeated. The Arctic Circle Collective
Hassan al Sabbah, a brilliant Iranian polymath and tactician, founded the Nizari Ismai’li state, a state that flourished from 1090 to 1256 AD in Iran and Syria. This small state relied on a cadre of fearless professional assassins to protect itself from conquests, and to protect co-religionists living elsewhere from massacres.
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From Lawline
It’s hardly a ringing endorsement of Bill Barr’s leadership of the Justice Department. And although the DOJ did succeed in withholding most of the documents sought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the court excoriated the Department for deceiving both the court and the public with regard to the roll out of the Mueller Report.
On March 24, 2019, approximately 10 seconds after Mueller handed in his homework, Barr fired off a letter to Congress announcing that the Special Counsel had been unable to find conclusive evidence of crimes and would not be indicting the president. In Barr’s telling, this decision was in no way based on the DOJ’s longstanding policy that a sitting president cannot be charged, but rather Mueller was ceding prosecutorial discretion to the Attorney General, who had thought long and hard about it