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When Steven Engel and Ed O’Callaghan Said It Was Legal for Russia to Hack Hillary

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There’s a detail of Bill Barr’s memo declining any prosecution of Trump for the Mueller investigation that I intended to point out after it was released.

Steven Engel and Ed O’Callaghan treated Russia’s hack of Hillary as if it was not a crime.

They did so because they treated Trump’s direction to Corey Lewandowski to order Jeff Sessions to limit Mueller’s investigation of Russian election tampering prospectively, not historically, along with Trump’s efforts to constrain Mueller’s investigation in other ways. In doing so, they applied the conclusion they had drawn — that Mueller hadn’t charged any underlying conspiracy and therefore there was no underlying crime into which Trump was trying to obstruct the investigation — to the Russian hack-and-leak itself.

The Report also discusses a second category of actions taken by the President after the appointment of the Special Counsel, most notably after he learned that the Special Counsel had opened an investigation into potential obstruction of justice. Most of the conduct identified consists of facially lawful actions that are part of the President’s constitutional responsibility to supervise the Executive Branch. The Special Counsel considers, for example, whether the President obstructed justice by asking the White House Counsel to direct the firing of the Special Counsel; by asking Corey Lewandowski to contact the Attorney General and seek his assistance in narrowing the Special Counsels investigation; and by asking the Attorney General to reverse his recusal and to supervise the Special Counsel’s investigation. We do not believe that the principles of federal prosecution support charges based upon any of those actions. As noted, the evidence does not establish that the President took any of these actions because he sought to prevent the investigation of an underlying criminal offense, separate and apart from the obstruction case, and the Department rarely brings obstruction cases absent a separate criminal offense. Such a prosecution is doubly inappropriate where, as here, the conduct under investigation is lawful on its face, and the evidence of any corrupt motive is, at the very least, questionable. Federal criminal statutes should be construed to avoid criminalizing generally innocent conduct. S See, e.g., Arthur Anderson, 544 U.S. at 703-04; Ratzlaf. United States, 510 USS. 135, 144 (1994). The standard for demonstrating that a public official acted with corrupt intent is demanding. And there is considerable evidence to suggest that the President took these official actions not for an illegal purpose, but rather because he believed the investigation was politically motivated and undermined his Administration’s efforts to govern.

Moreover, in evaluating the nature of the President’s conduct, it bears emphasis that none of his requests to change the supervision of the investigation were actually carried out. The conduct under investigation is based entirely upon “directions” by the President to subordinates to take actions on his behalf that they did not undertake. In each instance, if the President truly wanted to cause those actions, he could have done it himself (for instance, ordering the Deputy Attorney General to terminate the Special Counsel or directing the Attorney General to unrecuse or to resign). After the President provided his direction, in each instance, the orders were not carried out. Of course, it is true that an act may constitute an attempt or an endeavor, even if unsuccessful. But the facts that the President could have given these directions himself, and did not remove any subordinate for failing to convey his directions, weigh against finding an intent to obstruct justice. [my emphasis]

The Lewandowski direction, recall, wasn’t exclusively about the investigation into Trump. Trump’s scripted instructions were explicitly about “election meddling,” something Mueller charged in two separate indictments. Trump’s script for Sessions would have shut down investigation into Russia’s hack-and-leak campaign, not just Trump’s potential role in it.

During the June 19 meeting, Lewandowski recalled that, after some small talk, the President brought up Sessions and criticized his recusal from the Russia investigation. 605 The President told Lewandowski that Sessions was weak and that if the President had known about the likelihood of recusal in advance, he would not have appointed Sessions. 606 The President then asked Lewandowski to deliver a message to Sessions and said “write this down.”607 This was the first time the President had asked Lewandowski to take dictation, and Lewandowski wrote as fast as possible to make sure he captured the content correctly.608 The President directed that Sessions should give a speech publicly announcing:

I know that I recused myself from certain things having to do with specific areas. But our POTUS .. . is being treated very unfairly. He shouldn’t have a Special Prosecutor/Counsel b/c he hasn’t done anything wrong. I was on the campaign w/ him for nine months, there were no Russians involved with him. I know it for a fact b/c I was there. He didn’t do anything wrong except he ran the greatest campaign in American history.609

The dictated message went on to state that Sessions would meet with the Special Counsel to limit his jurisdiction to future election interference:

Now a group of people want to subvert the Constitution of the United States. I am going to meet with the Special Prosecutor to explain this is very unfair and let the Special Prosecutor move forward with investigating election meddling for future elections so that nothing can happen in future elections. 610

By treating the Lewandowski direction in the same analysis as stuff that more directly pertained to the investigation into Trump himself, Engel and O’Callaghan applied the same (corrupt) conclusion — that there was no underlying crime — to the Russian hack-and-leak as they did to Trump’s efforts to maximize the effect of the hack-and-leak. That amounts to claiming that Russia’s hack of Hillary and the Democratic party was not a crime.

That also means they imply that Trump believed the investigation of Russian hacking would interfere with his ability to govern.

Engel and O’Callaghan’s treatment of the Lewandowski direction with the other obstruction introduces other absurdities into their analysis. For example, Lewandowski wasn’t a subordinate. Trump couldn’t fire Lewandowski for blowing off this order. They don’t consider how much sketchier that made this order: Trump was trying to bypass the entire official chain-of-command to shut down the Russian investigation, making this less a Presidential order than a personal one.

To be clear: I don’t really think Engel and O’Callaghan meant to argue that Russia’s hack of Hillary wasn’t a crime; O’Callaghan would have overseen the decision to charge both Russian indictments.

Perhaps they hadn’t read the Mueller Report closely enough in the seven and a half hours they had before they started drafting this memo to understand the distinction. Perhaps they simply didn’t expect their analysis ever to be made public, so they didn’t much care that lumping the Lewandowski direction in with the other obstruction revealed that they hadn’t thought through this analysis, at all.

Their sloppy treatment of Lewandowski is just another testament to the corruption embodied by this whole memo.

But there it is, analysis from men who’ve since been welcomed at Dechert and WilmerHale that, read literally, suggests they think it was legal for Russia to hack Hillary.

How To Be a Handmaiden to Corruption, Barr Memo Press Coverage Edition

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Much of the coverage of the Barr Memo — written over a weekend after a 7-hour review of the Mueller Report to justify a public statement to Congress exonerating the former President — continues to magnify the corruption of Barr’s act, rather than expose it.

The memo makes numerous factual errors (errors that can be easily documented thanks to a public record liberated by Jason Leopold). One Judge — Amy Berman Jackson — issued a ruling saying that the memo doesn’t do what it claimed it did (deliberate about whether Trump could be charged). She even included a timeline to show her work. Three more Circuit Judges agreed with ABJ’s opinion that DOJ misrepresented what they claimed they had done — by saying they were making a prosecutorial decision rather than a public messaging decision — in an attempt to keep the memo under wraps.

You’d think that after four judges had called out DOJ for shenanigans with this memo, anyone remotely interested in performing the function of journalism would explain why those judges found the project so suspect, and the import of that to the actual claims made in the memo. CREW spent years doing the hard work of liberating the memo to make it easy for journalists!

Instead, numerous outlets simply parroted the language of the memo that four judges had ruled to be a messaging project, thereby treating the memo as a valid exercise of legal analysis and not a performance of corruption.

I’d like to pay tribute to some of the outlets that chose to be a handmaiden to corruption rather than journalists.

I should say, while I bitched about it the day of the release, the NYT improved their story by adding the work of Charlie Savage. (early version; later version) It still treats the focus on Don McGahn as real rather than tactical and chooses to primarily quote experts explaining the problems with the memo rather than lay that out directly. But it notes (as I did) that the memo doesn’t explain something that was at the core of Mueller’s obstruction analysis — pardons. It provides actual reporting explaining that Merrick Garland’s DOJ wasn’t hiding the substance of this when they fought to keep it sealed last year, they were making a “narrower legal” argument — presumably trying to preserve the exemption it had been sealed under (the b5A deliberative privilege).

After losing in court on Friday, the Justice Department had the option to appeal the case. But the department’s senior leadership decided to release the document, according to a senior official in federal law enforcement. The leadership never opposed airing its contents, but had contested its release on narrower legal grounds, the person added.

Compare that with some of the stenography that remains untouched.

Eric Tucker, Memo sheds light on decision to clear Trump in Russia probe (AP)

Unsurprisingly, Eric Tucker ignores the opinions from four judges who called out this memo and spends three paragraphs ignoring the evidence that this was a hash job instead describing it as a record of “how two of the department’s senior-most leaders arrived at that conclusion,” something the judicial record says it’s not. He then spends seven paragraphs rehashing part of Steven Engel and Ed O’Callaghan’s argument, never calling out factual errors and ignoring their even more problematic treatment of witness tampering. Only after that does Tucker explain that two courts (he only mentions the Circuit) deemed that it had been improperly withheld, without explaining why. Finally, in the last two paragraphs, he quotes from CREW about the substance of the memo, as if he doesn’t have the competence to assess it himself.

Ryan Lucas, DOJ releases a Mueller-era memo to Barr on the decision not to prosecute Trump (NPR)

Unlike the AP, NPR didn’t claim, in its headline, that this memo actually did represent the decision-making process. But Ryan Lucas dedicated much of his story on the memo — paragraphs three and four, and then nine through eleven — parroting the claimed rationale of the lawyers. It describes the rebukes from the judges this way: “A district court judge and a panel of circuit court judges disagreed and ordered its release.” That leaves him free to pitch the question of Barr’s exoneration of Trump (which he calls “declin[ing] to prosecute Trump”) as a he-said, she-said affair, pitting CREW and 1,000 former prosecutors against Trump and his supporters. Lucas ends the piece by describing the current investigation into whether Trump violated the Espionage Act and obstructed an investigation by refusing to return classified documents an investigation into “storing presidential documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence.”

Robert Legare, Government lawyers advised Barr not to bring obstruction charges against Trump after Mueller report, newly-released memo reveals (CBS)

Of 28 paragraphs in this story, twelve report the claimed analysis of the memo unfiltered, as if it really was a predecisional declination memo, as if it really did analyze the entirety of the report, as if it was factually accurate. It dedicates four paragraphs to more recent efforts of Barr and the others involved to justify their decisions or separate themselves from Trump. Rather than describing the years-long fight featuring judges repeatedly calling out both the project of the memo itself and the means by which it was hidden, Legare described only that it, “was ordered unsealed by an Appeals Court after a FOIA request and subsequent lawsuit were filed seeking its release.” Ultimately, then, this article treats the memo as something the judges say it’s not — a view that would be reinforced by an assessment of the actual claims made against the now-public record of the investigation itself.

Ryan J. Reilly and Dareh Gregorian, DOJ releases unredacted memo to Barr on Trump, obstruction in Mueller probe (NBC)

Reilly interrupted breaking a story about an important January 6 militia arrest the other day to cover this live and did a pretty good job on the air. But in the write-up with Dareh Gregorian, they spend paragraphs three through eight quoting at length from the memo. Along the way, they claim the memo “dismiss[ed] Mueller’s concerns about Trump’s … dangling of pardons to some witnesses,” rather than calling it out for ignoring pardons entirely. While the piece noted that Barr “announced that the Justice Department would not prosecute the case the same day the memo was sent to him” and described ABJ’s ruling that, “Barr’s mind had already been made up before the memo was written,” thereby hinting that the memo was just a messaging project, they don’t consider the import of that sequence for the analysis itself. And rather than identifying the problems of the memo themselves, they describe that, “many people strongly disagreed with the analysis laid out in the memo,” and explicitly identify CREW as ” left-leaning,” treating the actual substance as something inaccessible to them and so just a matter for ongoing political dispute.

Alexander Mallin, DOJ releases memo behind Barr’s decision not to prosecute Trump for obstruction (ABC)

To his credit, in the five paragraphs describing what led to the release of the memo with which Alexander Malin starts his coverage, he describes the judges concluding that, “Barr and other DOJ officials were not candid in their statements about the role the memo played in their decision to not charge Trump.” Which makes it all the more mystifying why he dedicates eleven paragraphs of his story quoting the memo at length, with no fact-checking or push-back, as if it the memo really was real analysis that led to Barr’s decision to make an announcement that he wouldn’t have charged Trump if he could have.

I get it. This memo came out amid a flood of news, especially for those of us on the DOJ beat. I get that people rushed to do quick analyses so they could go back to watching dockets in Florida, Georgia, and DC.

But what happened with this memo — four judges overriding a b5 exemption based on their assessment that DOJ misrepresented the function of the memo — is virtually unprecedented. That, by itself, should lead reporters to scrutinize the memo (or at least the process) for the kind of dishonesty the judges judged it was, rather than treating it as a transparent record of legal analysis that ABJ already showed it’s not. All the more so when, as is the case here, thousands of pages recording the underlying evidence (evidence that the authors of the memo explicitly say they’re not going to cite) are publicly available.

If you’re reporting on a document that DOJ made false claims in an attempt to keep secret, parroting what it says at length, with no discussion of why DOJ made misrepresentations to keep it secret, with no effort on your own to test whether what it says is any more true than what was said to keep it hidden, you’re doing readers a disservice.

Four judges and CREW (plus Leopold, with his earlier Mueller Report FOIA) have given you an easy way to reassess what Bill Barr did to pre-empt the results of the Mueller Report in 2019. To instead simply repeat his past claims or those whom he ordered (and worked with) to justify a pre-ordained result is not journalism.

Bill Barr Performed the Corruption He Was Trying To Deny

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Perhaps I have a perverse sense of humor.

But between bouts of yelling about the Barr Memo, I’ve been laughing my ass off.

There are a number of reasons I’m laughing, some that I won’t share because I don’t want to spoil what I expect to be the punchline. But one reason I can’t stop laughing is that Robert Mueller managed to get Barr to perform — and put down in writing!! — precisely the corruption Mueller was trying to document: corrupt interference in a criminal prosecution.

I can’t imagine that Robert Mueller intended to elicit this response from Billy Barr and the lawyers who had been overseeing Mueller’s work for almost two years. But because they made the corrupt decision to override Mueller’s studied refusal to made a final conclusion about whether Trump committed obstruction (in my opinion, Mueller viewed Volume II of the Report as an impeachment referral and so did this for separation of powers reasons), they ended up putting together a shoddy memo justifying their decision.

One reason it worked out that way was because Barr and his flunkies were working quickly: a rushed effort over the course of the weekend to substantiate false claims to share with Congress.

According to Barr’s book, he remembers getting the Mueller Report around 1:30PM on March 22, 2019.

As Amy Berman Jackson laid out in a timeline accompanying her decision ordering the release of the memo, starting with a draft of the letter to Congress by Steven Engel at 8:36PM on March 22, 2019 and working through the weekend, five men including Engel (according to some emails quoted by ABJ, Barr was present as well) drafted both the letter to Congress and the declination memo in parallel.

As ABJ pointed out (this was a second basis on which she ruled that DOJ had to release the memo, one the DC Circuit said it didn’t need to consider given all the other reasons it had laid out to uphold her decision), the drafting of the letter to Congress — which she showed in the left column — actually preceded the memo — in the right column — advising Barr that because one goal under the Justice Manual is to,

promot[e] confidence on the part of the public and individual defendants that important prosecutorial decisions will be made rationally and objectively on the merits of each case,

Barr should,

examine the Report to determine whether prosecution would be appropriate given the evidence recounted in the Special Counsel’s Report, the underlying law, and traditional principles of federal prosecution.

The public record, then, shows Barr telling Congress about his prosecution declination before he decided to read the Report or even accept the recommendation of people who claimed to have read the Report. It was all completed over a weekend in which the people supposedly advising him were at the same time being directed by him, everyone together in the Attorney General’s conference room for the weekend.

The men finished their letter to Congress announcing that Trump had not committed any crime just after 4:30PM on Sunday and then finalized the declination memo first thing Monday morning.

These men weren’t reading the 400-page Report to figure out what it said (and there’s evidence that neither Rod Rosenstein nor Barr ever read it closely). They were instead trying to figure out how to debunk a Report they had skimmed over the course of seven hours.

And that haste showed up in several places in the memo.

There’s the admission that their recommendations were largely the part of earlier discussions, including from before Barr was hired (as Barr described it, one of the lawyers, Henry Whitaker got pulled in for the first time over the weekend), and therefore only partly about the Report itself.

Over the course of the Special Counsel’s investigation, we have previously discussed these issues within the Department among ourselves, with the Deputy Attorney General, and with you since your appointment, as well as with the Special Counsel and his staff. Our conclusions are the product of those discussions, as well as our review of the Report.

They repeat that admission to explain why they dedicate fully a third of the single page discussing legal precedents to a discussion that happened on July 3, 2018, before the evidence about the Stone interactions with Russia, Paul Manafort’s ties with Konstantin Kilimnik, and Michael Cohen’s interactions with the Kremlin were fully developed.

In our prior discussions, the Special Counsel has acknowledged that “we have not uncovered reported cases that involve precisely analogous conduct.” See Special Counsel’s Office Memorandum to the 600.4 File, Preliminary Assessment of Obstruction Evidence, at 12 (July 3, 2018).

And there’s the footnote explaining that they just weren’t going to cite any facts.

  1. Given the length and detail of the Special Counsel’s Report, we do not recount the relevant facts here. Our discussion and analysis assumes familiarity with the Report as well as much of the background surrounding the Special Counsel’s investigation.

The other reason this memo embodies corruption is that corruption lays at the core of the statute Mueller rested his obstruction analysis on: 18 USC 1512(c)(2) — the same statute DOJ is using in the January 6 prosecutions. So Barr’s 9-page memo had to find a way to claim those actions weren’t corrupt, without entirely parroting the analysis he did in the audition memo he used to get the job, and without acknowledging Barr’s three statements — made under oath during his confirmation hearing — that trading pardons for false testimony would be obstruction (the word “pardon” does not appear in this memo).

Predictably, that discussion was really shoddy. In a key passage, for example, they adopt just one possible measure of corrupt intent, personal embarrassment, something that is only mentioned four times in the Report, always in conjunction with a discussion of at least marginal criminal exposure. Then they use that as a straw man central to their dismissal of Mueller’s lengthy analysis and their decision not to actually engage with Mueller’s analysis.

The Report thus suggests that the President’s exercise of executive discretion for any improper reason, including the prevention of personal embarrassment, could constitute obstruction of justice if it impeded a pending investigation. As we have discussed with you, we do not subscribe to such a reading of the obstruction-of-justice statutes. No reported case comes close to upholding a conviction of such breadth, and a line of Supreme Court precedent, including Arthur Anderson, weighs heavily in favor of objectivity and certainty in the federal criminal law. In order to reach the conclusions in this memorandum, however, we do not believe it necessary to address this disagreement further, because in our view, Volume II of the Report does not establish offenses that would warrant prosecution, even under such a broad legal framework.

Much of their subsequent analysis, dismissing the ten possible examples of obstruction in the Report, was simply factually inaccurate (and in once case, conflicted with something Barr’s own DOJ said a year later). It was not just the then-ongoing Roger Stone conspiracy investigation that refuted the claims Barr had rubber-stamped in secret, and it was not just the ongoing Roger Stone investigation that Barr later took unprecedented steps to thwart so as to protect his basis for exonerating the President. They made claim after claim that wasn’t even an accurate representation of the Report. Just as one measure, as noted, the memo doesn’t use the word pardon at all; the Mueller Report uses it 67 times.

It was only the expectation that all this would remain secret that let Barr and his flunkies entertain the fantasy that any of this could, “promot[e] confidence on the part of the public and individual defendants that important prosecutorial decisions will be made rationally and objectively on the merits of each case.” So they had to keep it secret.

And so, after it was written, a snowball of additional corruption followed, with DOJ making false claims about what was in the memo, and DOJ making more false claims, and Barr taking extraordinary steps to try to ensure that later facts didn’t prove him wrong.

But you don’t have to go further than these nine pages to see that this intervention just dripped with the corruption they were trying to deny.

The Barr Memo Relied on Covering Up the Ongoing Roger Stone Conspiracy Investigation

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DOJ has released the memo that Ed O’Callaghan and Steven Engel used to claim there wasn’t evidence to charge Trump with obstruction.

A key part of it is a claim that the evidence in Volume I was “conclusive” that there wasn’t evidence to charge any of Trump’s flunkies with conspiring with Russia.

Only at least O’Callaghan knew that the evidence wasn’t conclusive. On Page 178, the Mueller Report they claimed was conclusive revealed that they had referred Stone for further investigation into whether he had conspired with Russian to hack.

The Office determined that it could not pursue a Section 1030 conspiracy charge against Stone for some of the same legal reasons. The most fundamental hurdles, though, are factual ones.1279

1279 Some of the factual uncertainties are the subject of ongoing investigations that have been referred by this Office to the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office.

DOJ covered that footnote up for another 20 months, releasing it only the day before the 2020 election.

From that point forward, Barr had to make sure that DOJ wouldn’t pursue that investigation into Stone, because it would expose the lie at the core of his cover-up.

Bill Barr Is Not Dick Cheney

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Imagine if David Addington had co-signed the torture memos written by John Yoo?

I wanted to comment on a Quinta Jurecic column about the Barr Memo that Merrick Garland’s DOJ chose to withhold parts of, as well as this thread from Kel McClanahan responding to Jurecic. Their exchange focuses on how judges may have responded to Donald Trump’s Administration, and what kind of the traditional deference we should expect Garland’s DOJ to get. I’d like to add a few points that may show one possible angle for accountability for Bill Barr moving forward.

Those points start in the difference between Dick Cheney and Bill Barr. Bill Barr is not Dick Cheney. Both men were the masterminds of horrible policy under their respective (most recent) president. Both, in different ways, badly politicized the government. But Dick Cheney was, in my opinion, the most accomplished master of bureaucracy that DC had seen in a very long time. Barr, by contrast, either didn’t have Cheney’s bureaucratic finesse or just didn’t fucking care to hide his power plays. And the difference may provide means for accountability where it didn’t under Obama.

The worst Bush policies that Cheney implemented were torture and Gitmo, warrantless wiretapping, and the Iraq War. The first two implemented illegal policies by using Office of Legal Counsel to sanction them in advance. And, significantly (but not entirely) because of that, Obama never found the political means to fully excise those earlier policies. Obama only ever got paper prohibitions on torture, he never closed Gitmo, and one of the last things Loretta Lynch did was finalize an effort to legalize the last bits of Stellar Wind by approving EO 12333 sharing rules.

I believe that’s because Cheney used OLC specifically and the Executive bureaucracy generally to make any reversals more costly, a reversal of a position of the Executive Branch, rather than a treatment of crime as crime.

Barr used OLC too, plus he shielded a bunch of epically corrupt efforts to turn DOJ into the instrument of Trump’s personal will under his prerogative as Attorney General, especially prosecutorial discretion. The Barr Memo itself — a request to be advised to make a decision that Trump was not guilty of obstruction and then to announce it — was what he claims to be an instance of prosecutorial discretion. The decision to engage in unprecedented interference with Roger Stone’s sentencing was billed as an incidence of prosecutorial discretion. The decision to reverse the Mike Flynn prosecution, which entailed reversing prosecutorial decisions his own DOJ had approved at the highest levels, adopting a standard on crime that was inconsistent with every precedent, and ultimately included inventing evidence and altering documents, all that was billed as an instance of prosecutorial discretion. The decision to not only protect Rudy Giuliani from legal consequences of participating in an information campaign waged by a known agent of Russia, but also to ingest that disinformation and use it to conduct a criminal investigation of Trump’s rival’s son was also billed as an instance of prosecutorial discretion.

But in all those actions, Barr took steps that necessitated further exercise of corruptly exercised “prosecutorial discretion,” which snowballed. This is why the content of the Barr memo, which we can anticipate with a high degree of certainty, matters. The Barr memo necessarily addresses the pardon dangles (as well as the stuff that Barr said couldn’t be obstruction if a President did it). And I believe that the content of the Barr memo likely contributed to this snowball effect, possibly leading Barr to take later steps to try to limit the impact of having issued a prosecutorial declination for a crime still in progress, which in turn snowballed.

The aftermath of this effect is one detail that Jurecic and McClanahan don’t address. Jurecic says that under Trump,

judges were, perhaps unconsciously, responding to their own distrust in Trump’s oath of office by denying him—in one form or another—the presumption of good faith

She argues that Amy Berman Jackson’s anger about the memo is just another instance of this. That may be true, in part.

But it is also a fact that after ABJ presided over the Stone and Manafort cases, and as such ABJ has a detailed knowledge of what the Mueller Report showed that Barr did not get in the 48 hours while he was trying to get advice on how best to give Trump a clean bill of health (and, indeed, his public comments show he never got that detailed knowledge). In both those cases, Barr abused his discretion as Attorney General to try to make a pardon unnecessary, the snowball effect that his memo may have necessitated.

In service to his effort to minimize Stone’s prison time, Barr treated a threat against ABJ personally as a technicality. Then he lied about what he had done, falsely claiming that he had used the same thought process ABJ had when in fact he instead said threats against her could have no effect on the trial. After he treated the threat against ABJ as a technicality in the Stone case, a Mike Flynn supporter riled up by the lies Barr mobilized to try to overturn Flynn’s prosecution threatened to assassinate Emmet Sullivan. And even after that, Barr kept throwing more and more resources at undoing two decisions Emmet Sullivan made in December 2019, that Flynn’s lies were material and that prosecutors had not engaged in misconduct in his prosecution.

With his memo on the Mueller Report, Barr turned at least the year-plus prosecution of Roger Stone over which ABJ presided — and to a lesser degree the 18-month Paul Manafort prosecution — into legal nullities, in advance.

In short, it may be true that judges generally and ABJ specifically distrusted the good faith of Barr and DOJ’s effort to protect Barr.

But it is also the case that in the wake of this memo, Barr usurped the judicial authority of both ABJ and Emmet Sullivan and he took steps that minimized and contributed to dangerous threats against both.

ABJ is angry. Reggie Walton is angry. Other DC District judges are angry. But they’re angry in the wake of  Attorney General Bill Barr usurping their authority and dismissing violent threats against them and their colleagues.

This is one way Barr is different from Cheney. Cheney’s decisions, too, involved treating judges like doormats. In the effort to legalize a part of Stellar Wind in 2004, for example, DOJ told Colleen Kollar-Kotelly that she had no authority to do anything but rubber stamp a massive pen register that might collect the Internet records of millions of Americans. But DOJ did that in secret; it was years before any but a handful of Kollar-Kotelly’s colleagues even knew that, and I’m one of the very few human beings who understands that that happened. Where such claims happened in public, as with detainee fights related to Gitmo, even SCOTUS ultimately defied Cheney’s claims about Article III authority in Boumediene. But unlike Barr, Cheney maintained the illusion of legal order, in which Article III could rein in Article II.

Then there’s how they used OLC.

Jurecic portrays the dispute between ABJ and DOJ as one about their candor about the content of the memo.

For all the rhetorical fireworks, the substantive dispute between the government and Jackson is relatively narrow. It more or less boils down to an argument over whether or not the Justice Department was adequately precise in court about the specific arguments the memo addressed, and whether the department misled the court on the subject.

That’s part of it, but there’s another part that Jurecic and McClanahan don’t address — and that DOJ did not address at all in their response to ABJ, something that goes as much to the core of the deliberative claim as the substance of what Barr was trying to do.

ABJ complained not just that DOJ’s two declarants, Paul Colburn and Vanessa Brinkmann, and the attorney arguing the case, Julie Straus Harris, weren’t sufficiently clear about the substance of the memo (and I’m somewhat sympathetic to those who said she should have figured this out).

ABJ also made several process complaints about the memo — first, that Brinkmann’s declaration did not include details that are required in such declarations:

[Brinkmann] does not claim to have any personal knowledge of why the document was created or what its purpose might be, and while she states generally at the beginning of the declaration that she consulted with “knowledgeable Department personnel,” she does not state that she spoke with any particular person to gain first hand information about the provenance of this document. Id. ¶ 3. Instead, she appears to rely on her review of the document itself to make the following unattributed pronouncements about the decision that is supposedly at issue:

While the March 2019 Memorandum is a “final” document (as opposed to a “draft” document), the memorandum as a whole contains pre-decisional recommendations and advice solicited by the Attorney General and provided by OLC and PADAG O’Callaghan. The material that has been withheld within this memorandum consists of OLC’s and the PADAG’s candid analysis and legal advice to the Attorney General, which was provided to the Attorney General prior to his final decision on the matter. It is therefore pre-decisional. The same material is also deliberative, as it was provided to aid in the Attorney General’s decision-making process as it relates to the findings of the SCO investigation, and specifically as it relates to whether the evidence developed by SCO’s investigation is sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-ofjustice offense. This legal question is one that the Special Counsel’s “Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election” . . . did not resolve. As such, any determination as to whether the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense was left to the purview of the Attorney General. [emphasis original]

She also complained that Straus Harris included a “flourish” on similar topics that was not based on the declarations before her.

The flourish added in the government’s pleading that did not come from either declaration – “PADAG O’Callaghan had been directly involved in supervising the Special Counsel’s investigation and related prosecutorial decisions; as a result, in that capacity, his candid prosecutorial recommendations to the Attorney General were especially valuable.” Id. at 14 – seems especially unhelpful since there was no prosecutorial decision on the table.

These are complaints about process, how certain content got into the declarations and memos submitted before her court, as much as they are about content. Again, DOJ simply blew off these complaints in their response to ABJ.

ABJ explains why they’re important in the section of her opinion addressing any claim to attorney-client privilege.

There are also other problems with the agency’s showing.

While the memorandum was crafted to be “from” Steven Engel in OLC, whom the declarant has sufficiently explained was acting as a legal advisor to the Department at the time, it also is transmitted “from” Edward O’Callaghan, identified as the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General. The declarants do not assert that his job description included providing legal advice to the Attorney General or to anyone else; Colborn does not mention him at all, and Brinkmann simply posits, without reference to any source for this information, that the memo “contains OLC’s and the PADAG’s legal analysis and advice solicited by the Attorney General and shared in the course of providing confidential legal advice to the Attorney General.” Brinkmann Decl. ¶ 16.19

The declarations are also silent about the roles played by the others who were equally involved in the creation and revision of the memo that would support the assessment they had already decided would be announced in the letter to Congress. They include the Attorney General’s own Chief of Staff and the Deputy Attorney General himself, see Attachment 1, and there has been no effort made to apply the unique set of requirements that pertain when asserting the attorney-client privilege over communications by government lawyers to them. Therefore, even though Engel was operating in a legal capacity, and Section II of the memorandum includes legal analysis in its assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the purely hypothetical case, the agency has not met its burden to establish that the second portion of the memo is covered by the attorney-client privilege.

19 The government’s memorandum adds that “PADAG O’Callaghan had been directly involved in supervising the Special Counsel’s investigation and related prosecutorial decisions,” Def.’s Mem. at 14, but that does not supply the information needed to enable the Court to differentiate among the many people with law degrees working on the matter.

Effectively, the details inserted into declarations and memos without the proper bases — the flourishes — both hint at and and serve to hide that there is no regularity to either the prosecutorial decision or the OLC advice included in this memo. Had Brinkmann supplied the details that would make her declaration proper — “well, I asked Ed O’Callaghan and he said this wasn’t so much Engel giving Barr advice but instead a bunch of men sitting in Barr’s office laying a paper trail” — it would have given the game away. But that’s what the record describes, and the import of the unexplained structure of this “OLC memo” — which normally would be given great deference in the case of deliberative claims — which is co-authored by someone acting in a prosecutorial role.

And rather than address ABJ’s complaints, the DOJ response admits that OLC is not authorized to make decisions for other parts of DOJ.

One relevant factor in determining whether a document is predecisional is whether the author possesses the legal authority to decide the matter at issue. See, e.g., Electronic Frontier Found. v. DOJ, 739 F.3d 1, 9 (D.C. Cir. 2014) (“OLC is not authorized to make decisions about the FBI’s investigative policy, so the OLC Opinion cannot be an authoritative statement of the agency’s policy.”).

And unstated in this Frankenstein structure is that the memo asks Ed O’Callaghan to make a decision that OLC has said that prosecutorial figures cannot make about the President.

This is why the comparison with Cheney is useful. John Yoo and Steven Bradbury wrote some unbelievably inexcusable memos to authorize the illegal actions Cheney wanted to pursue. They were used as (and indeed, at one point CIA asked for) advance prosecutorial declinations for crimes not yet committed. But with one exception from Bradbury, they maintained the form of an OLC memo. They started their memos with the assumptions that their ultimate audience had asked them to consider, performed the illusion of legal review, and provided the answer they knew their audience wanted.

Imagine if John Yoo had put David Addington or John Rizzo’s names on his memo as co-author; it would change the legal value of the memo entirely. Sure, we know that Yoo was right there in the room as Addington planned the torture program. But he nevertheless performed the illusion of legal advice.

Not so here.

I think McClanahan is right that the declarations being made to hide OLC memos from FOIA release have always been dodgy. I complained about Colburn pulling tricks in 2011 and 2016, for example. But to the extent that anyone looked at those memos — and to the extent that Barack Obama tried to break from the policies justified by them — they nevertheless had the appearance of regularity. They looked like legal advice, even if the legal advice was transparently shitty. And as a result, they made it very hard to hold people accountable for crimes they committed in reliance on the memo.

What separates this memo from the shitty memos used to justify torture is that it doesn’t have the appearance of regularity. It doesn’t even pretend that it’s not excusing (at least insofar as the pardon dangles) crimes in progress.

I agree with McClanahan that DOJ far too often is granted the presumption of regularity. The ultimate fate of this memo may break that habit.

But it also is different, and should be treated differently (and I hope CREW addresses this on appeal) because the process problems with this FOIA — the unexplained claims made by both Brinkmann and Straus Harris — were there to hide the fact that the process that created this memo was irregular, and therefore the claims themselves should not be accorded the presumption of regularity of a deliberative OLC memo.

And once you start to pull the threads on the attempts Barr made to protect Trump, they all tend to suffer from the same inept implementation. That inept — and, I suspect, at times illegal — implementation is what the Garland DOJ on its own or after being forced by the DC Circuit should use to distinguish Barr’s abuse of Attorney General prerogative from that entitled to defense out of an institutional basis. Barr not only abused his power (which Cheney also did) but he did so either without caring enough to pretend he was doing it right, or because he didn’t have the competence to do so (it also probably made things more difficult for him that he had to coerce so many career employees to effect his policies).

Both the torture memos and the Barr memo on the Mueller report were designed (at least in part) to immunize crimes in process. But Cheney’s willing OLC enabler at least insisted on pretending to be an objective lawyer.

Bill Barr Issued Prosecution Declinations for Three Crimes in Progress

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On March 24, 2019, by judging that there was not evidence in Volume II of the Mueller Report that Trump had obstructed justice, Billy Barr pre-authorized the obstruction of justice that would be completed with future pardons of Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone. He did so before the sentencing of Flynn and before even the trial of Stone.

This is why Amy Berman Jackson should not stay her decision to release the Barr Memo. It’s why the question before her goes well beyond the question of whether the Barr memo presents privileged advice. What Barr did on March 24, 2019 was pre-authorize the commission of crimes that ended up being committed. No Attorney General has the authority to do that.

As the partially unsealed memo makes clear, Steve Engel (who, even per DOJ’s own filing asking for a stay, was not permitted to make prosecutorial decisions) and Ed O’Callaghan (who under the OLC memo prohibiting the indictment of the President, could not make prosecutorial decisions about the President) advised Bill Barr that he should, “examine the Report to determine whether prosecution would be appropriate given the evidence recounted in the Special Counsel’s Report, the underlying law, and traditional principles of federal prosecution.”

In her now-unsealed memo ordering the government to release the memo, ABJ argues, “the analysis set forth in the memo was expressly understood to be entirely hypothetical.”

It was worse than that.

It was, necessarily, an instance of “Heads Trump wins, Tails rule of law loses.” As the memo itself notes, the entire exercise was designed to avoid, “the unfairness of levying an accusation against the President without bringing criminal charges.” It did not envision the possibility that their analysis would determine that Trump might have committed obstruction of justice. So predictably, the result of the analysis was that Trump didn’t commit a crime. “[W]ere there no constitutional barrier, we would recommend, under Principles of Federal Prosecution, that you decline to commence such a prosecution.”

The government is now appealing ABJ’s decision to release the memo to hide the logic of how Engel and O’Callaghan got to that decision. And it’s possible they want to hide their analysis simply because they believe that, liberated from the entire “Heads Trump wins, Tails rule of law loses” premise of the memo, it becomes true deliberative advice (never mind that both Engel and O’Callaghan were playing roles that OLC prohibits them to play).

But somehow, in eight pages of secret analysis, Engel and O’Callaghan decide — invoking the entire Special Counsel’s Report by reference — that there’s not evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump obstructed justice.

We can assume what some of these eight pages say. In the newly unsealed parts, Engel and O’Callaghan opine, “that certain of the conduct examined by the Special Counsel could not, as a matter of law, support an obstruction charge under the circumstances.”

As Quinta Jurecic’s epic chart lays out, the potential instances of obstruction of justice before Engel and O’Callaghan included a number of things involving Presidential hiring and firing decisions — the stuff which the memo Bill Barr wrote as an audition for the job of Attorney General said could not be obstruction.

To address those instances of suspected obstruction, then, Engel and O’Callaghan might just say, “What you said, Boss, in the memo you used to audition to get this job.” That would be scandalous for a whole bunch of reasons — partly because Barr admitted he didn’t know anything about the investigation when he wrote the memo (even after the release of the report, Barr’s public statements made it clear he was grossly unfamiliar with the content of it) and partly because it would raise questions about whether by hiring Barr Trump obstructed justice.

But that’s not actually the most scandalous bit about what must lie behind the remaining redactions. As Jurecic’s chart notes, beyond the hiring and firing obstruction, the Mueller Report laid out several instances of possible pardon dangles: to Mike Flynn, to Paul Manafort, to Roger Stone, and to Michael Cohen. These are all actions that, in his confirmation hearing, Barr admitted might be crimes.

Leahy: Do you believe a president could lawfully issue a pardon in exchange for the recipient’s promise to not incriminate him?

Barr: No, that would be a crime.

Even Barr admits the question of pardon dangles requires specific analysis.

Klobuchar: You wrote on page one that a President persuading a person to commit perjury would be obstruction. Is that right?

Barr: [Pause] Yes. Any person who persuades another —

Klobuchar: Okay. You also said that a President or any person convincing a witness to change testimony would be obstruction. Is that right?

Barr: Yes.

Klobuchar: And on page two, you said that a President deliberately impairing the integrity or availability of evidence would be an obstruction. Is that correct?

Barr: Yes.

Klobuchar: OK. And so what if a President told a witness not to cooperate with an investigation or hinted at a pardon?

Barr: I’d have to now the specifics facts, I’d have to know the specific facts.

Yet somehow, in eight pages of analysis, Engel and O’Callaghan laid out “the specific facts” that undermined any case against Trump for those pardon dangles. I’d be surprised if they managed to do that convincingly in fewer than eight pages, particularly since they make clear that they simply assume you’ve read the Mueller Report (meaning, that analysis almost certainly doesn’t engage in the specific factual analysis that Bill Barr says you’d need to engage in).

The far, far more problematic aspect of this analysis, though, is that, of the four potential instances of pardon dangles included in the Mueller Report, three remained crimes-in-progress on March 24, 2019 when Barr issued a statement declining prosecution for them.

By then, Michael Cohen had already pled guilty and testified against Trump. But Paul Manafort had only just been sentenced after having reneged on a cooperation agreement by telling lies to hide what the government has now confirmed involved providing assistance (either knowing or unknowing) to the Russia election operation. Mike Flynn had not yet been sentenced — and in fact would go on to renege on his plea agreement and tell new lies about his conduct, including that when he testified to the FBI that he knew he discussed sanctions, he didn’t deliberately lie. And Roger Stone hadn’t even been tried yet when Barr said Stone’s lies to protect Trump weren’t a response to Trump’s pardon dangles. In fact, if you believe Roger Stone (and I don’t, in part because his dates don’t line up), after the date when Barr issued a declination statement covering Trump’s efforts to buy Stone’s silence, prosecutors told him,

that if I would really remember certain phone conversations I had with candidate trump, if I would come clean, if I would confess, that they might be willing to, you know, recommend leniency to the judge perhaps I wouldn’t even serve any jail time

If that’s remotely true, Barr’s decision to decline prosecution for the pardon dangles that led Stone to sustain an obviously false cover story through his trial itself contributed to the obstruction.

Barr’s decision to decline prosecution for obstruction crimes that were still in progress may explain his even more outrageous behavior after that. For each of these remaining crimes in progress, Barr took steps to make it less likely that Trump would issue a pardon. He used COVID as an excuse to spring Paul Manafort from prison to home confinement, even though there were no cases of COVID in Manafort’s prison at the time. He engaged in unprecedented interference in the sentencing process for Roger Stone, even going so far as claiming that threats of violence against (as it happens) Amy Berman Jackson were just a technicality not worthy of a sentencing enhancement. And Bill Barr’s DOJ literally altered documents in their effort to invent some reason to blow up the prosecution of Mike Flynn.

And Barr may have realized all this would be a problem.

On June 4, a status report explained that DOJ was in the process of releasing the initially heavily redacted version of this memo to CREW and expected that it would be able to do so by June 17, 2020, but that “unanticipated events outside of OIP’s control” might delay that.

However, OIP notes that processing of the referred record requires consultation with several offices within DOJ, and that unanticipated events outside of OIP’s control may occur in these offices that could delay OIP’s response. Accordingly, OIP respectfully submits that it cannot definitively guarantee that production will be completed by June 17, 2020. However, OIP will make its best efforts to provide CREW with a response regarding the referred record on or before June 17, 2020

This consultation would have occurred after Judge Emmet Sullivan balked at DOJ’s demand that he dismiss the Flynn prosecution, while the DC Circuit was reviewing the issue. And it occurred in the period when Stone was using increasingly explicit threats against Donald Trump to successfully win a commutation of his sentence from Trump (the commutation occurred weeks after DOJ gave CREW a version of the memo that hid the scheme Barr had engaged in). That is, DOJ was making decisions about this FOIA lawsuit even as Barr was taking more and more outrageous steps to try to minimize prison time — and therefore the likelihood of a Trump pardon — for these three. And Trump was completing the act of obstruction of justice that Barr long ago gave him immunity for by commuting Stone’s sentence.

Indeed, Trump would go on to complete the quid pro quo, a pardon in exchange for lies about Russia, for all three men. Trump would go on to commit a crime that Barr already declined prosecution for years earlier.

While Barr might believe that Trump’s pardon for Mike Flynn was righteous (even while it undermined any possibility of holding Flynn accountable for being a secret agent of Turkey), there is no rational argument you can make that Trump’s pardon of Manafort after he reneged on his plea deal and Trump’s pardon of Stone after explicit threats to cooperate with prosecutors weren’t obstruction of justice.

This may influence DOJ’s decision not to release this memo, and in ways that we can’t fathom. There are multiple possibilities. First, this may be an attempt to prevent DOJ’s Inspector General from seeing this memo. At least the Manafort prison assignment and the Stone prosecution were investigated and may still be under investigation by DOJ. If Michael Horowitz discovered that Barr took these actions after approving of a broad pre-declination for pardon-related obstruction, it could change the outcome of any ongoing investigation.

It may be an effort to stave off pressure to open a criminal investigation by DOJ into Barr’s own actions, a precedent no Attorney General wants to set.

Or, it may just be an effort to hide how many of DOJ’s own rules DOJ broke in this process.

But one thing is clear, and should be clearer to ABJ than it would be to any other judge: Bill Barr issued a prosecution declination for three crimes that were still in process. And that’s what DOJ is hiding.

Frankenstein’s OLC: DOJ Says DOJ Can’t Do What DOJ Did in the Barr Memo

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DOJ’s memo asking Amy Berman Jackson to stay her opinion releasing the OLC memo admits that DOJ is not permitted to do what DOJ did with the Barr memo it is trying to withhold from FOIA. And part of the memo itself, which DOJ unsealed last night, also shows DOJ is not permitted to do what DOJ did.

The memo itself admits, for example, that the OLC is not permitted to do what only other parts of DOJ — here, FBI — have the authority to do.

One relevant factor in determining whether a document is predecisional is whether the author possesses the legal authority to decide the matter at issue. See, e.g., Electronic Frontier Found. v. DOJ, 739 F.3d 1, 9 (D.C. Cir. 2014) (“OLC is not authorized to make decisions about the FBI’s investigative policy, so the OLC Opinion cannot be an authoritative statement of the agency’s policy.”).

That undoubtedly extends to prosecutorial decisions. And yet OLC did make a prosecutorial decision.

Rather, the declarations and briefs on the whole made clear that the decision in question was whether the facts articulated by Volume II of the Special Counsel’s Report were sufficient to establish that the President had committed obstruction of justice, i.e., whether the facts constituted prosecutable conduct under the Principles of Federal Prosecution.

DOJ found a way around that, of course, in Julie Straus Harris’ flourish: the inclusion of Ed O’Callaghan in the deliberation. Except that’s a problem, because every declaration in this litigation treats this as an OLC memo, not a prosecutorial memo.

Moreover, it means O’Callaghan made a decision he was not permitted to do by the OLC: make a decision about whether or not the President committed a crime.

In fact, the memo itself states that DOJ is limited in what it can do: either bring charges or not.

Although the Special Counsel has declined to reach a conclusion, we think that the Department should reach a judgement on this matter. Under traditional principles of prosecution, the Department either brings charges or it does not.

Except in this instance, Barr did something else (indeed, ABJ’s memo makes it clear that was the entire point): he announced a decision on prosecution that was more than a declination. He chose to make a decision that OLC says he can’t make.

OLC does not, as it would be required to, state that DOJ can make a prosecutorial decision that involves something other than bringing charges or not.

This is, ultimately, a Frankenstein monster, both a prosecutorial decision that, absent more analysis than appears here, OLC says neither O’Callaghan nor Barr were permitted to make, and an OLC memo engaged in a prosecutorial role that OLC says OLC can’t do. Effectively, then, this memo engages in activities that defies the claim that OLC guidance governs the entirety of the Executive Branch, including OLC.

On the Barr Memo: Julie Straus Harris Says Julie Straus Harris’ Unexplained “Flourish” Wasn’t a Lie

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Yesterday, DOJ told Amy Berman Jackson that they will appeal her decision to release the entirety of a memo written to justify Billy Barr taking a “Heads Trump wins Tails democracy loses” approach to the decision on how to deal with the Mueller Report. There are several problems with their motion for a stay while they do that.

To understand the first problem, note the signature line of their motion for a stay.

It is signed by — among others — Julie Straus Harris.

That’s a problem, possibly even an ethical one, because in addition to problems with the declarations submitted by Vanessa Brinkmann and Paul Colburn, ABJ had a specific problem with a brief submitted by Straus Harris (and approved by Elizabeth Shapiro, her boss).

As ABJ noted in her opinion, Straus Harris added a “flourish” that was not supported by any of the underlying declarations.

And the in camera review of the document, which DOJ strongly resisted, see Def.’s Opp. to Pl.’s Cross Mot. [Dkt. # 19] (“Def.’s Opp.”) at 20–22 (“In Camera Review is Unwarranted and Unnecessary”), raises serious questions about how the Department of Justice could make this series of representations to a court in support of its 2020 motion for summary judgment:

[T]he March 2019 Memorandum (Document no. 15), which was released in part to Plaintiff is a pre-decisional, deliberative memorandum to the Attorney General from OLC AAG Engel and PADAG Edward O’Callaghan . . . . The document contains their candid analysis and advice provided to the Attorney General prior to his final decision on the issue addressed in the memorandum – whether the facts recited in Volume II of the Special Counsel’s Report would support initiating or declining the prosecution of the President . . . . It was provided to aid in the Attorney General’s decision-making processes as it relates to the findings of the Special Counsel’s investigation . . . . Moreover, because any determination as to whether the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense was left to the purview of the Attorney General, the memorandum is clearly pre-decisional.

Def.’s Mem. in Supp. of Mot. [Dkt. # 15-2] (“Def.’s Mem.”) at 14–15 (internal quotations, brackets, and citations omitted).13

13 The flourish added in the government’s pleading that did not come from either declaration – “PADAG O’Callaghan had been directly involved in supervising the Special Counsel’s investigation and related prosecutorial decisions; as a result, in that capacity, his candid prosecutorial recommendations to the Attorney General were especially valuable.” Id. at 14 – seems especially unhelpful since there was no prosecutorial decision on the table.

In the motion for a stay, Julie Straus Harris says, sorry, “the briefs” — her briefs — “could have been clearer … but the government’s counsel” — meaning, Straus Harris — “did not intend to mislead the Court.”

On the merits, the Court’s decision was substantially premised on the view that the government’s briefs and declarations incorrectly described the nature of the decisional process in which the Attorney General was engaged. In retrospect, the government acknowledges that its briefs could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused. But the government’s counsel and declarants did not intend to mislead the Court, and the government respectfully submits that imprecision in its characterization of the decisional process did not warrant the conclusion that Document no. 15 was unprotected by the deliberative process privilege.

The motion spends several pages explaining why the Brinkmann and Colburn declarations were not misleading. That section vaguely waves at “briefing” to address claimed inaccuracies in the briefs written by Straus Harris. The section mentions the offending brief once, but without even remotely addressing the brief itself.

The first Colborn Declaration likewise explained that Document no. 15 “was submitted to the Attorney General to assist him in determining whether the facts set forth in Volume II of Special Counsel Mueller’s report ‘would support initiating or declining the prosecution of the President for obstruction of justice under the Principles of Federal Prosecution.’” Colborn Decl. ¶ 17. That description quotes from the unredacted portion of the opening sentence of the memorandum and is accurate; it neither states nor necessarily implies that the authors were advising the Attorney General on whether the President should actually be prosecuted. See also Def.’s Mem. in Supp. of Mot. for Summ. J. (Def.’s Mem.) (ECF No. 15-2) 14 (quoting Colborn Decl.). [my emphasis]

But the section explaining that ABJ’s complaints, while understandable, are unfounded never addresses ABJ’s complaint about the Straus Harris “flourish,” which is a complaint of a different kind. Edward O’Callaghan is only mentioned as an author of this memo.

To be sure: Straus Harris didn’t simply invent O’Callaghan’s role or his import out of thin air. She’s not making stuff up. She’s right that her claim about O’Callaghan was not a lie, even if she never makes it explicitly. But in a legal and ethical sense, she made an assertion about which no one has asserted to the veracity or even explained. This memo assumes as given that OLC and a prosecutor’s supervisor can get together and write an OLC memo, something which was obviously problematic even before these memos started coming out. And that’s a problem because the reasons why DOJ didn’t want to explain O’Callaghan’s role in a declaration (indeed, could not) go to the core of the problems with the Barr Memo.

I’m sympathetic that Straus Harris got put on the front line to answer for Billy Barr’s wildly inappropriate efforts to give the President a clean bill of health. But she is now in a position where she’s submitting a brief about her own conduct, and that brief entirely ignores ABJ’s complaint about her conduct.

Had Paul Colburn included in his declarations an admission that DOJ had let O’Callaghan serve a hybrid role, ABJ wouldn’t have had the confusion that DOJ is now trying to explain away. But admitting that would have — and does — admit to far graver problems with the Barr Memo.

Will Amy Berman Jackson Finally Break the Spell of OLC Feeding Bullshit FOIA Claims to DC District Judges?

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Yesterday, Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that the government must turn over a memo written — ostensibly by Office of Legal Counsel head Steve Engel — to justify Billy Barr’s decision not to file charges against Donald Trump for obstructing the Mueller Investigation. The Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington FOIAed the memo and sued for its release. The memo itself is worth reading. But I want to consider whether, by making a nested set of false claims to hide what OLC was really up to, this opinion may pierce past efforts to use OLC to rubber stamp problematic Executive Branch decisions.

A key part of ABJ’s decision pivoted on the claims made by Paul Colburn, who’s the lawyer from OLC whose job it is (in part) to tell courts that DOJ can’t release pre-decisional OLC memos because that would breach both deliberative and attorney-client process, Vanessa Brinkmann, whose job it is (in part) to tell courts that DOJ has appropriately applied one or another of the exemptions permitted under FOIA, and Senior Trial Attorney Julie Straus Harris, who was stuck arguing against release of this document relying on those declarations. ABJ ruled that all three had made misrepresentations (and in the case of Straus Harris, outright invention) to falsely claim the memo was predecisional and therefore appropriate to withhold under FOIA’s b5 exemption.

Colburn submitted two declarations. ABJ cited this one to show that Colburn had claimed the OLC memo was designed to help Billy Barr make a decision.

Document no. 15 is a predecisional deliberative memorandum to the Attorney General, through the Deputy Attorney General, authored by OLC AAG Engel and Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General (“PADAG”) Edward O’Callaghan . . . . As indicated in the portions of the memorandum that were released, it was submitted to the Attorney General to assist him in determining whether the facts set forth in Volume II of Special Counsel Mueller’s report “would support initiating or declining the prosecution of the President for obstruction of justice under the Principles of Federal Prosecution.” The released portions also indicate that the memorandum contains the authors’ recommendation in favor of a conclusion that “the evidence developed by the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” The withheld portions of the memorandum contain legal advice and prosecutorial deliberations in support of that recommendation. Following receipt of the memorandum, the Attorney General announced his decision publicly in a letter to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees . . . .

* * *

[T]he withheld portions of document no. 15 – the only final document at issue – are . . . covered by the deliberative process privilege. The document is a predecisional memorandum, submitted by senior officials of the Department to the Attorney General, and containing advice and analysis supporting a recommendation regarding the decision he was considering . . . . [T]he withheld material is protected by the privilege because it consists of candid advice and analysis by the authors, OLC AAG Engel and the senior deputy to the Deputy Attorney General. That advice and analysis is predecisional because it was provided prior to the Attorney General’s decision in the matter, and it is deliberative because it consists of advice and analysis to assist the Attorney General in making that decision . . . . The limited factual material contained in the withheld portion of the document is closely intertwined with that advice and analysis. [emphasis original]

Brinkmann submitted this declaration. ABJ cited it to show how Brinkmann had regurgitated the claims Colburn made.

While the March 2019 Memorandum is a “final” document (as opposed to a “draft” document), the memorandum as a whole contains pre-decisional recommendations and advice solicited by the Attorney General and provided by OLC and PADAG O’Callaghan. The material that has been withheld within this memorandum consists of OLC’s and the PADAG’s candid analysis and legal advice to the Attorney General, which was provided to the Attorney General prior to his final decision on the matter. It is therefore pre-decisional. The same material is also deliberative, as it was provided to aid in the Attorney General’s decision-making process as it relates to the findings of the SCO investigation, and specifically as it relates to whether the evidence developed by SCO’s investigation is sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of justice offense. This legal question is one that the Special Counsel’s “Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election” . . . did not resolve. As such, any determination as to whether the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense was left to the purview of the Attorney General. [emphasis original]

Key to this is timing: Colburn twice claimed the memo was provided to Barr before he made any decision, and based on that, Brinkmann not only reiterated that, but claimed that Mueller’s Report “did not resolve” whether Trump could be charged, which left the decision to Barr. Both were pretending a decision had not been made before this memo was written (much less completed).

In an almost entirely redacted section, ABJ explained how the first part of the memo is actually a strategy discussion (which, a redacted section seems to suggest, might have been withheld under some other FOIA exemption that DOJ chose not to claim because that would have required admitting this wasn’t legal advice), written in tandem by everyone involved, about how to best spin the already-made decision not to charge Trump.

The existence of that section contradicts the claims made by Colburn and Brinkmann, ABJ ruled.

All of this contradicts the declarant’s ipse dixit that since the Special Counsel did not resolve the question of whether the evidence would support a prosecution, “[a]s such, any determination as to whether the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense was left to the purview of the Attorney General.” Brinkmann Decl. ¶ 11.

Then, after ABJ decided she needed to review the document over DOJ’s vigorous protests, she discovered something else (again, she redacted the discussion for now) that made her believe claims made in a filing written by Straus Harris not just to be false, but pure invention with respect to the role of Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General Edward O’Callaghan, who was privy to what Mueller was doing and the import Mueller accorded to the other OLC memo dictating that Presidents can’t be prosecuted.

And the in camera review of the document, which DOJ strongly resisted, see Def.’s Opp. to Pl.’s Cross Mot. [Dkt. # 19] (“Def.’s Opp.”) at 20–22 (“In Camera Review is Unwarranted and Unnecessary”), raises serious questions about how the Department of Justice could make this series of representations to a court in support of its 2020 motion for summary judgment:

[T]he March 2019 Memorandum (Document no. 15), which was released in part to Plaintiff is a pre-decisional, deliberative memorandum to the Attorney General from OLC AAG Engel and PADAG Edward O’Callaghan . . . . The document contains their candid analysis and advice provided to the Attorney General prior to his final decision on the issue addressed in the memorandum – whether the facts recited in Volume II of the Special Counsel’s Report would support initiating or declining the prosecution of the President . . . . It was provided to aid in the Attorney General’s decision-making processes as it relates to the findings of the Special Counsel’s investigation . . . . Moreover, because any determination as to whether the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense was left to the purview of the Attorney General, the memorandum is clearly pre-decisional.

Def.’s Mem. in Supp. of Mot. [Dkt. # 15-2] (“Def.’s Mem.”) at 14–15 (internal quotations, brackets, and citations omitted).13

13 The flourish added in the government’s pleading that did not come from either declaration – “PADAG O’Callaghan had been directly involved in supervising the Special Counsel’s investigation and related prosecutorial decisions; as a result, in that capacity, his candid prosecutorial recommendations to the Attorney General were especially valuable.” Id. at 14 – seems especially unhelpful since there was no prosecutorial decision on the table.

I noted the problem with O’Callaghan’s role here, and argued there are probably similar problems with an OLC opinion protect Trump in the wake of Michael Cohen’s guilty plea.

In her analysis judging that an attorney-client privilege also doesn’t apply, ABJ returns to this point and expands on it, showing that in addition to Steve Engel (the head of OLC), O’Callaghan, who was not part of OLC and whom the memo never claims was involved in giving advice to Billy Barr, was also involved in generating the memo; the record also shows that the people supposedly receiving the advice, such as Rod Rosenstein, actually were involved in providing the advice, too.

While the memorandum was crafted to be “from” Steven Engel in OLC, whom the declarant has sufficiently explained was acting as a legal advisor to the Department at the time, it also is transmitted “from” Edward O’Callaghan, identified as the Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General. The declarants do not assert that his job description included providing legal advice to the Attorney General or to anyone else; Colborn does not mention him at all, and Brinkmann simply posits, without reference to any source for this information, that the memo “contains OLC’s and the PADAG’s legal analysis and advice solicited by the Attorney General and shared in the course of providing confidential legal advice to the Attorney General.” Brinkmann Decl. ¶ 16.19

The declarations are also silent about the roles played by the others who were equally involved in the creation and revision of the memo that would support the assessment they had already decided would be announced in the letter to Congress. They include the Attorney General’s own Chief of Staff and the Deputy Attorney General himself, see Attachment 1, and there has been no effort made to apply the unique set of requirements that pertain when asserting the attorney-client privilege over communications by government lawyers to them. Therefore, even though Engel was operating in a legal capacity, and Section II of the memorandum includes legal analysis in its assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the purely hypothetical case, the agency has not met its burden to establish that the second portion of the memo is covered by the attorney-client privilege

19 The government’s memorandum adds that “PADAG O’Callaghan had been directly involved in supervising the Special Counsel’s investigation and related prosecutorial decisions,” Def.’s Mem. at 14, but that does not supply the information needed to enable the Court to differentiate among the many people with law degrees working on the matter.

ABJ notes (and includes a nifty table in an appendix showing her work) that in fact the letter to Congress that was supposed to be based off the decision the OLC memo was purportedly providing advice about was finished first, meaning it couldn’t have informed the decision conveyed in the letter to Congress.

A close review of the communications reveals that the March 24 letter to Congress describing the Special Counsel’s report, which assesses the strength of an obstruction-of-justice case, and the “predecisional” March 24 memorandum advising the Attorney General that [redacted] the evidence does not support a prosecution, are being written by the very same people at the very same time. The emails show not only that the authors and the recipients of the memorandum are working hand in hand to craft the advice that is supposedly being delivered by OLC, but that the letter to Congress is the priority, and it is getting completed first. At 2:16 pm on Sunday, March 24, the Attorney General’s Chief of Staff advises the others: “We need to go final at 2:25 pm,” and Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, summons everyone to a meeting at 2:17 pm. Attachment 1 at 4. At 2:18 pm, Steven Engel in the OLC replies to this email chain related to the draft letter, and he attaches the latest version of the memo to the Attorney General, saying: “here’s the latest memo, btw, although we presumably don’t need to finalize that as soon.”

As a result, ABJ rules that this was neither pre-decisional nor candid advice from someone acting in the role of attorney given to another, and so the document must be released.

Ultimately, this is a finding that the claims made by DOJ — by Colburn, Brinkmann, and Straus Harris — have no credibility on this topic. She cites Reggie Walton’s concerns (in the BuzzFeed FOIA for the Mueller Report itself) about Billy Barr’s lies about the Mueller Report and notes that DOJ has been “disingenuous” to hide Barr’s own “disingenuous[ness].”

And of even greater importance to this decision, the affidavits are so inconsistent with evidence in the record, they are not worthy of credence. The review of the unredacted document in camera reveals that the suspicions voiced by the judge in EPIC and the plaintiff here were well-founded, and that not only was the Attorney General being disingenuous then, but DOJ has been disingenuous to this Court with respect to the existence of a decision-making process that should be shielded by the deliberative process privilege. The agency’s redactions and incomplete explanations obfuscate the true purpose of the memorandum, and the excised portions belie the notion that it fell to the Attorney General to make a prosecution decision or that any such decision was on the table at any time. [redacted]

ABJ is careful to note (in part to disincent Merrick Garland’s team from appealing this, which she has given DOJ two weeks to consider doing) that this decision is limited solely to application of the claims made before her. The often-abused b5 exemption is not dead.

The Court emphasizes that its decision turns upon the application of well-settled legal principles to a unique set of circumstances that include the misleading and incomplete explanations offered by the agency, the contemporaneous materials in the record, and the variance between the Special Counsel’s report and the Attorney General’s summary. This opinion does not purport to question or weaken the protections provided by Exemption 5 or the deliberative process and attorney-client privileges; both remain available to be asserted by government agencies – based on forthright and accurate factual showings – in the future.

But this leaves the question about what to do about all this lying — Colburn and Brinkmann and Straus Harris’ misrepresentations to protect the lies of Billy Barr and his team. Billy Barr is gone, along with Rosenstein and Engel and O’Callaghan and Brian Rabbitt (Barr’s Chief of Staff), who “colluded” (heh) to make it appear that this process wasn’t all gamed for PR value from the start.

There’s little (immediate) recourse for their lies.

But as far as I know, Colburn and Brinkmann and Straus Harris remain at DOJ, now having been caught offering misrepresentations to protect former superiors’ lies after their past equivalent representations have — for decades — been accepted unquestioningly by DC District Judges. I’ve raised concerns in the past, for example, about claims that Colburn made in 2011 (to hide drone killing opinions) and in 2016 (to hide a long-hidden John Yoo opinion on which surveillance has been based).

The reason ABJ and Reggie Walton caught DOJ in lies about the Mueller Report is not that DOJ hasn’t long been making obviously questionable claims to hide rubber stamp opinions from OLC behind the b5 exemption and obviously questionable claims to withhold documents in FOIA lawsuits. Rather, they caught DOJ in lies in this case because Billy Barr was a less accomplished (or at least more hubristic) liar than Dick Cheney (and because DOJ cannot, in this case, also make expansive claims about secrecy in the service of National Security). It is also the case that when John Yoo and David Barron rubber stamped Executive Branch excesses, they were more disciplined about creating the illusion of information being tossed over a wall to a lawyer and a decision being tossed back over the wall to the decision-maker. That was merely an illusion at least in Yoo’s case — he was both in the room where decisions were made and massaging the analysis after the fact to authorize decisions that were already made.

It would be nice to use this decision to go back and review all the dubious claims Colburn and Brinkmann have made over the years. Rudy Giuliani’s potential prosecution may offer good reason to do so in the case of Steve Engel’s equally dubious opinion withholding the Ukraine whistleblower complaint from Congress.

But at the very least, what this opinion does is show that career DOJ employees have, at least in the Bill Barr era, made less than credible claims to cover up DOJ lies, and in this case, lies about how OLC functions as a rubber stamp for Executive Branch abuse.

We may have no (immediate) recourse about the people whose abuse necessitated such misrepresentations for their protection — Barr and Rosenstein and O’Callaghan and Engel and Rabbitt — though their future legal opponents may want to keep this instance in mind.

But it is becoming a habit that when DC judges check DOJ claims in FOIA suits, those claims don’t hold up. At the very least, more scrutiny about the claims made in these nested set of declarations may finally pierce the bullshit claims made to protect OLC’s role in rubber stamping Executive Branch abuse.

Billy Barr’s OLC Declinations

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The NYT reported yesterday that, in a bid to retroactively exonerate the President, Billy Barr pursued ways to overturn the campaign finance conviction of Michael Cohen.

But Mr. Barr spent weeks in the spring of 2019 questioning the prosecutors over their decision to charge Mr. Cohen with violating campaign finance laws, according to people briefed on the matter.

As part of that effort, Barr got the Office of Legal Counsel to write a memo (though not a formal opinion) about the applicability of criminal campaign finance law to efforts to squelch public information.

At one point during the discussions, Mr. Barr instructed Justice Department officials in Washington to draft a memo outlining legal arguments that could have raised questions about Mr. Cohen’s conviction and undercut similar prosecutions in the future, according to the people briefed on the matter.

[snip]

The New York Times reported previously that Mr. Barr had questioned the legal theory of the campaign finance charges against Mr. Cohen, but it was not known that the attorney general went so far as to ask for the draft memo or had raised his concerns more than once.

The memo, written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, addressed the Southern District’s somewhat novel use of campaign finance laws to charge Mr. Cohen. Before Mr. Cohen’s guilty plea, the only person known to face criminal charges for payments meant to keep negative information buried during a political campaign was the former senator and Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, who was not convicted.

Mr. Barr argued, among other things, that such cases might be better suited to civil resolutions by the Federal Election Commission than to criminal prosecutions, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

Mr. Cohen, who reported to prison in May 2019, was recently released on furlough and is currently serving his sentence at his Manhattan home, after citing health concerns related to the coronavirus.

There is no indication that the Justice Department planned to issue a formal opinion on the campaign finances charges. Such a step, if taken, might have raised questions about the validity of the case against Mr. Cohen and affected any future effort to investigate Mr. Trump or others in his circle for similar conduct.

The news that Barr got OLC involved in criminal charging matters has repercussions on several other levels.

First, it means that potentially before Mueller finished his report, OLC would have established new ground on campaign finance crimes. That’s important because two of the declinations in the Mueller Report involve Trump’s acceptance of campaign dirt from foreigners — both the people at the June 9 meeting, and Roger Stone’s apparent optimization of the WikiLeaks releases. While that’s a different application of campaign finance (and not one that’s a clear cut case), OLC’s involvement on one application before the Mueller Report release opens the possibility that Steve Engel similarly weighed in on another, with direction from Barr about what they should decide.

Add in the fact that Engel, along with PDAG Ed O’Callaghan, did the analysis behind Barr’s decision to decline to prosecute Trump for obstruction of justice. It would be inappropriate for OLC to make a prosecutorial decision in any case, all the more so given that OLC has an opinion saying that no one DOJ should be making such decisions at all. Now add in the fact that Engel must have weighed in during the weeks leading up to this decision about campaign finance issues.

It’s now widely agreed (though was always clear from the public record) that Trump lied in his responses to Mueller about his conversations with Roger Stone about WikiLeaks. And his hints that Stone would be pardoned are one of his most obstructive acts. Effectively, then, Engel would be playing both sides of the prosecutorial decision, setting the rules and then applying them, which isn’t how justice is supposed to work.

Finally, consider that the Stone prosecutors were prepared to introduce Stone’s lies to HPSCI about coordinating with Trump on his campaign efforts as 404(b) evidence (effectively to show that his lies were systematic). That Stone was coordinating (he kept asking Rick Gates for lists, which should have been purchased from the campaign, and he asked Steve Bannon to get him funding from Rebekah Mercer during the period when Bannon was running the campaign) would seem to be a campaign finance issue. This is another matter that OLC’s review of campaign finance may have implicated.

It’s not just that Barr went out of his way to make it legal for outsides to pay to suppress bad news, but it’s that he’s secretly rewriting campaign finance law in ways that may have wider implications. And by doing so, Barr may have limited other prosecutorial decisions implicating Trump.