Judge Questions Barr Credibility, Will Review Mueller Report

(Bloomberg) -- A federal judge in Washington questioned Attorney General William Barr's credibility and said he'll conduct an independent review of the Mueller Report to determine whether the Justice Department properly redacted it.

In a blistering opinion issued Thursday, U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton in Washington said he had concerns that Attorney General William Barr sought to “create a one-sided narrative” in summarizing the report so it would be favorable to President Donald Trump.

A redacted public version of the 381-page report was released following the Barr summary, according to the judge, who said he questions whether those redactions are “self-serving” and were made to support Barr's public comments.

“These circumstances generally, and Attorney General Barr's lack of candor specifically, call into question Attorney General Barr's credibility,” Walton said in a Freedom of Information Act case filed last year by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Buzzfeed Inc. to get access to the unredacted report.

Walton, who was appointed to the federal bench by President George W. Bush, denied a Justice Department request to dismiss the case.

The Justice Department didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on Walton's ruling.

The public version of the report indicated that material redacted behind black bars includes information that would harm an ongoing investigation, discloses investigative techniques, reveals private information of third parties or comes from secret grand jury testimony.

On March 24, Barr released a letter stating what he called the “principal conclusions” of the Mueller report, which was released the following month. In the letter, Barr said that the “investigation did not find that the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election.”

Barr also said that the Mueller report didn't put forth sufficient evidence to establish that Trump committed obstruction of justice.

Robert Mueller, who was appointed special counsel to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, later disagreed with Barr's interpretation of his report, complaining about his summaries in a letter to the attorney general in March that later was made public.

“The summary letter the department sent to Congress and released to the public late in the afternoon of March 24 did not fully capture the context, nature, and substance of this office's work and conclusions,” Mueller wrote.

In his first public remarks after the release of his report, Mueller said in May, “If we had had confidence the president clearly did not commit a crime we would have said so.”

The case is Electronic Privacy Information Center v. U.S. Department of Justice, 19-cv-00810, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia (Washington).

To contact the reporter on this story: Bob Van Voris in federal court in Manhattan at rvanvoris@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: David Glovin at dglovin@bloomberg.net, Peter Blumberg

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