A federal appeals panel said Friday that the Justice Department under Attorney General William Barr was wrong to keep parts of an internal memo from the public.
The department argued that the private deliberations of its own lawyers were exempt from being disclosed. The Biden administration appealed to a higher court after a federal judge ordered it to be given to a group that had sued for it.
The Justice Department's attorneys didn't respond to an email asking for comment on the ruling. The full court can hear the appeal.
There is a March 24, 2019, memo from the head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, or OLC, and another senior department official that was prepared for Barr to evaluate whether evidence in Robert Muller's investigation could support an obstruction of justice prosecution.
According to Barr, he looked to that opinion to conclude that Trump did not violate the law.
The Justice Department turned over some documents to the group, but refused to give them a memo. Government lawyers argued that they were entitled to keep the memo because it reflected internal deliberations before a decision was made.
District Judge Amy Berman Jackson said last year that those arguments were disingenuous because the memo was prepared for Barr at about the same time as a separate Justice Department letter telling Congress and the public that Barr and other senior department leaders concluded that Trump had not obstruction of justice.
If the Justice Department had decided that there would be no obstruction case, the memo wouldn't have been pre-decisional.
According to the government, there will be no obstruction prosecution since Justice Department legal opinions say a sitting president can't be indicted. The issue of whether the evidence gathered could support a conclusion that Trump had obstruction of justice was the subject of the memo.
The rulings in the case may have been different if Justice Department officials had told the court that the memo was related to Barr's decision to make a public statement.
The Department failed to justify its reliance on the deliberative-process privilege because it didn't tie the memo to deliberations about the decision, according to the ruling.
The attorney general shared with Congress the conclusion that Trump's actions didn't amount to obstruction. Trump had not been found guilty of obstruction of justice.
The judges noted that the ruling was narrow and that it shouldn't be interpreted to call into question any of the precedents allowing agencies to refuse to release draft documents.
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Meg Kinnard can be reached through her social media accounts.
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Eric Tucker made a contribution.
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