WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday sharply rebuked Attorney General William Barr’s handling of the special counsel’s Russia report, saying Barr had made a “calculated effort” to spin the investigation’s findings in favor of President Donald Trump and had shown a “lack of candor.”
U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton delivered the criticism in a 23-page ruling in which he said he would review an unredacted version of the Mueller report before deciding what additional information from the document should be publicly disclosed under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
The Justice Department in April released a 448-page redacted version of Mueller’s report, which examined ties between Russia and the 2016 presidential campaign and potential obstruction of justice by the president. BuzzFeed News and the Electronic Privacy Information Center later sued for access to the entire document.
In his ruling, Walton said he needed to review the document itself because he could not trust that the Justice Department’s redactions of the report were made properly and in good faith. Walton said it would be “disingenuous” to presume the redactions were “not tainted by Attorney General Barr’s actions and representations” throughout the process.
The actions cited by the judge include the release last March of a four-page summary of Mueller’s findings. Mueller complained that Barr had not adequately captured the seriousness of his report’s conclusions, and Mueller criticized an April press conference by Barr that preceded the public release of the report.
The judge said he struggled to reconcile Barr’s public characterizations of the report — which included his statement that Mueller found “no collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia — with what the document actually said.
Those inconsistencies, Walton wrote, “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.”
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