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Judge Finds DOJ Violated Federal Law with Certain Mueller Report Redactions; Orders Pages Released
Judge Finds DOJ Violated Federal Law with Certain Mueller Report Redactions; Orders Pages Released Before Election
Jerry LambeOct 1st, 2020, 1:14 pm
https://www.cbs17.com/news/local-news/wake-county-news/garner-man-named-companies-after-game-of-thrones-characters-in-covid-relief-fraud-scheme-feds-say/
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Senior U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, a George W. Bush appointee who previously read the entire Mueller report and ordered the DOJ to answer a spreadsheet full of questions about the report’s publicly hidden contents, reasoned that the DOJ improperly redacted sections of the report pursuant to the deliberative process privilege contained in Exemption 5 of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
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Exemption 5—which has also been used to withhold a memo outlining DOJ’s legal position against charging President Donald Trump with obstruction—allows for the withholding of, among other things, information relating to the “deliberative process.” The DOJ invoked the privilege to withhold documents it said would have revealed “criminal charges considered but not pursued against certain named individuals under investigation.”
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“The Department has withheld information regarding decisions that were already final, rendering the withheld information as information that was ‘made after the decision and designed to explain it,’ which the Supreme Court has held is not privileged,” Walton wrote, citing to a 1975 U.S. Supreme Court case which stated that the “distinction between predecisional communications, which are privileged, and communications made after the decision and designed to explain it, which are not.”
“As the Department candidly indicates, the information withheld reflects Special Counsel Mueller’s deliberations about decisions not to prosecute—information that falls within the latter category that the Supreme Court has held is not privileged,” Walton continued. “Accordingly, the Court denies the Department’s motion for summary judgment as to this information and grants the plaintiffs’ motions for summary judgment for its production, and concludes that the Department must disclose the information redacted pursuant to Exemption 5, unless such information has been properly withheld pursuant to another exemption.”
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Read the full decision at link.
