WASHINGTON — The Justice Department on Wednesday released under court order all of a 2019 memo in which two top officials advised then-Attorney General William Barr not to charge then-President Donald Trump with obstructing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry into Russian interference in the 2016 US election.
Barr’s decision to clear Trump after receiving the memo drew criticism from many Democrats and some former Justice Department lawyers, who accused the top US law enforcement official of protecting his boss. Mueller himself did not exonerate Trump of committing obstruction of justice in trying to impede the probe.
The department had released parts of the nine-page memo while keeping other portions secret. The government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) sued to challenge those redactions, leading a federal appeals court in Washington last week to order its full release.
“The memo presents a breathtakingly generous view of the law and facts for Donald Trump,” CREW said in a statement. “Among many other problems, it is premised on the fact that there was no underlying criminal conduct, which is not what Mueller found, and waives its hand at there being no exact precedent to compare it to.”
The March 24, 2019, memo was written by Steven Engel, then head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and Edward O’Callaghan, another top department official. They wrote that charging Trump with obstruction would be problematic because the entire first section of Mueller’s report did not find sufficient evidence that Trump or any member of his campaign team had illegally conspired with Russia.
“Given that conclusion, the evidence does not establish a crime or criminal conspiracy involving the President toward which any obstruction or attempted obstruction by the President was directed,” the memo concludes.
It also said Mueller’s investigation was not “similar to any reported case that the department has previous charged” using obstruction statutes.
