The DOJ, under former Attorney General William Barr, chose not to charge Trump over 10 possible acts of obstruction.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) on Monday night appealed a decision from a district judge, made earlier this month, that would have required the department to release full details of a memo that former Attorney General William Barr had said helped him decide not to prosecute former President Donald Trump. The DOJ agreed to release the first page and half of the second page of that memo, but argued that attorney-client privilege would be violated if the remainder of the document was made public. The memo says that although special counsel Robert Mueller did not come to a conclusion on whether obstruction of justice charges should be brought against Trump in his report about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, the Justice Department would not be making any such charges. Barr and other officials in the department had suggested the memo, which was crafted shortly after Mueller submitted his report in 2019, contained details of their deliberative process for choosing not to prosecute Trump. Following that DOJ assertion, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed an open records request demanding to see the memo. Earlier this May, D.C. Circuit Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that the Justice Department, now under Attorney General Merrick Garland’s watch, was disingenuous in its arguments against sharing the memo, as it had appeared to her that the document was not so much about making a decision to charge Trump or not but rather a justification for a decision that had already been made not to charge the former president.
