{"id":1617043,"date":"2022-08-20T04:33:12","date_gmt":"2022-08-20T08:33:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1617043"},"modified":"2022-08-20T04:33:16","modified_gmt":"2022-08-20T08:33:16","slug":"court-orders-release-of-2019-doj-memo-about-whether-trump-obstructed-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/court-orders-release-of-2019-doj-memo-about-whether-trump-obstructed-justice\/","title":{"rendered":"Court Orders Release of 2019 DOJ Memo About Whether Trump Obstructed Justice"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">24<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fcourt-orders-release-of-2019-doj-memo-about-whether-trump-obstructed-justice%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1617043&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><p>A federal appeals court on Friday ordered the Department of Justice (DOJ) to release a 2019 internal memo that then-Attorney General Bill Barr had reviewed before deciding whether to prosecute then-<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theepochtimes.com\/t-president-donald-trump\">President Donald Trump<\/a> for obstruction of justice\u00a0in relation to the Mueller special counsel investigation.<\/p>\n<p>A panel of three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, led by\u00a0Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan,\u00a0came to the unanimous decision (<a href=\"https:\/\/www.citizensforethics.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/Final-opinion.pdf\">pdf<\/a>) in a case\u00a0brought by the\u00a0nonprofit organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a\u00a0government transparency group.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAttorney General Barr cited this memo as a reason not to charge President Trump with obstruction of justice,\u201d CREW spokesperson Jordan Libowitz said in a statement. \u201cThe American people deserve to know what it says. Now they will.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>On Twitter, the group <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/CREWcrew\/status\/1560639138809843712\">announced<\/a>: \u201cWe won! We\u2019re 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\u2019re going to make it public.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The memo was sent to Barr on\u00a0March 24, 2019, from the head of the Justice Department\u2019s Office of Legal Counsel and another senior department official\u2014then-Assistant Attorney General Stephen Engel, and then-Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Edward O\u2019Callaghan, respectively.<\/p>\n<p> Judges Reject DOJ\u2019s Argument <\/p>\n<p>Lawyers for the DOJ <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theepochtimes.com\/doj-to-appeal-court-ruling-to-release-memo-related-to-trump-obstruction-decision_3829592.html\">had argued<\/a> that the memo represented private deliberations of its lawyers before any formal decision on Mueller\u2019s report was reached, and as such, they were\u00a0entitled to \u201cdeliberative-process privilege\u201d under public records law and the memo was therefore exempted from disclosure.<\/p>\n<p>But\u00a0U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of a lower court <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theepochtimes.com\/doj-to-appeal-court-ruling-to-release-memo-related-to-trump-obstruction-decision_3829592.html\">rejected the argument on May 3, 2021<\/a>\u00a0(<a href=\"https:\/\/storage.courtlistener.com\/recap\/gov.uscourts.dcd.207679\/gov.uscourts.dcd.207679.27.0_1.pdf\">pdf<\/a>), and ordered the DOJ to provide the memo in full to CREW.<\/p>\n<p>She concluded that the memo represented \u201cstrategic, as opposed to legal advice\u201d and would fall outside the scope of the exemption.\u00a0Jackson added that the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A federal appeals court on Friday ordered the Department of Justice (DOJ) to release a 2019 internal memo that then-Attorney General Bill Barr had reviewed before deciding whether to prosecute then-President Donald Trump for obstruction of justice\u00a0in relation to the Mueller special counsel investigation. A panel of three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":183,"featured_media":2315279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1617043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1617043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/183"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1617043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1617043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2315279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1617043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1617043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1617043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}