The Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr improperly withheld portions of an internal memorandum Barr cited in publicly announcing that then-President Donald Trump had not committed obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation, a federal appeals panel said Friday.
The department had argued that the 2019 memo represented the private deliberations of its own lawyers before any decision had been formalized, and was therefore exempt from disclosure. A federal judge previously disagreed, ordering the Justice Department to provide it to a government transparency group that had sued for it, prompting an appeal last year by the Biden administration to a higher court.
Barr has said that he looked to that opinion in concluding that Trump did not illegally obstruct the Russia probe. She said the memo could therefore not have been "predecisional" in nature if the Justice Department had already decided that there would be no obstruction case.
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