March 24, 2020
Attorney General William Barr was dissed big-time weeks ago by a senior judge on the federal bench for lying in his representations and handling of the Mueller report.
Judge Reggie Walton of the US District Court for the District of Columbia demanded from the Department of Justice (DOJ) an unredacted version of the Mueller report to assess whether DOJ's ample redactions were justified, in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request-based lawsuit filed by a journalist and a non-profit group.
"The inconsistencies between Attorney General Barr's statements, made at a time when the public did not have access to the redacted version of the Mueller Report to assess the veracity of his statements, and portions of the redacted version of the Mueller Report that conflict with those statements cause the Court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary," Walton wrote.
Barr's Donald Trump-apologist, April 18, 2019 press conference happened mere hours before the release of the heavily redacted report. The press conference was a curiosity, timing-wise, and it was a monstrosity, spin-wise, slanting the Mueller report heavily in Trump's favor.
Barr misrepresented the as-yet-then-unpublished Mueller report as having exonerated Trump.
The Mueller report did no such thing.
The Mueller report concluded that there was no prosecutable conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign attributable to the latter, while finding ample evidence of Russian meddling in favor of Trump and ample evidence that the Trumph campaign welcomed the Russian interference with open arms. In Chapter II, the Mueller report drew no criminal liability conclusions after describing more than ten instances of obstruction of justice by Trump personally. No conclusions or indictments were drawn or brought against Trump only because of a longstanding DOJ policy forbidding it to bring charges against a sitting president.
If you think this federal judge's demand is politically motivated, think again.
Judge Walton was a G.W. Bush appointee.
So how did DOJ respond to Judge Walton? It argued that Walton made assertions that "were contrary to the facts."
Meanwhile, yesterday the House Judiciary Committee postponed indefinitely Barr's appearance to defend, among other things, his mischaracterization of the Mueller report.
The culprit? COVID-19.
[Author's March 31, 2020 Note: According to the washingtonexaminer.com article, DOJ turned over the unredacted Mueller report to Judge Walton yesterday, but the court will not review the report until at least April 20, 2020 due to the corona virus pandemic.]