Reporter, Slate
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/03/barr-mueller-report-redactions-foia.html
Mark David Stern reports for Slate:
Attorney General William Barr’s wildly inappropriate campaign to spin the Mueller report in Donald Trump’s favor last year may have finally backfired. On Thursday, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton ordered Barr to submit the full, unredacted report so he could assess whether the Department of Justice’s redactions comply with the Freedom of Information Act. Walton’s remarkable order noted that Barr’s “misleading public statements” about the report raise the possibility that his redactions are “tainted” and “self-serving”—and, by extension, illegal.
On March 24, Barr notoriously provided a “summary” of the 381-page Mueller report just two days after receiving it. He cited special counsel Robert Mueller’s report as saying that the investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” leaving out the damaging first half of that sentence. Barr also wrote that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had concluded “that the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” In reality, Mueller had determined that he would not offer an opinion on the matter but that the evidence gathered was not sufficient to clear Trump of obstruction of justice.
Three days after Barr released his summary, Mueller sent a letter to the attorney general stating that the summary “did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance” of the report. When members of Congress asked Barr about Mueller’s possible objections to his summary, he flatly lied. And on April 18, Barr delivered a stunningly dishonest press conference effectively announcing that the report exonerated the president.
In his Thursday order, Walton took issue with both the “summary” and the press conference. Barr’s initial summary, he wrote, “distorted the findings in the Mueller Report” in at least two ways. First, Barr “failed to indicate” that Mueller “identified multiple contacts” between the Trump campaign “and individuals with ties to the Russian government.” Second, he excluded the fact that Mueller “determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment” about Trump’s alleged obstruction of justice, falsely implying that the report found no obstruction.
. . . .
**************************
Read the full article at the link.
So, migrants who tell the truth too often are found to be “not credible” by Barr’s wholly-owned Immigration Judges because of some minor discrepancy in their testimony. But, Barr blatantly and openly lies and gets to continue screwing up our justice system. What’s wrong with this picture?
Uh, “lack of candor tribunals” — isn’t that a ground for discipline or disbarment?
PWS
03-07-20