My god, the man has committed/flirted with so many crimes that it’s almost impossible to keep up, literally. Who here had forgotten that there are basically ten ready-wrapped indictments against Trump from the Mueller investigation? Obstruction of justice and perjury are crimes. The Mueller report did not find evidence of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, perhaps in part because everyone lied and obstructed justice, which the report absolutely did find. Mueller specifically testified that Trump could be charged with obstruction of justice when stepping down.

The media requested the memo, which concerned how Barr and the DOJ would “characterize Mueller’s findings” with respect to obstruction of justice. Barr didn’t want to come out and say, “Mueller found obstruction of justice and perjury.” So they had a memorandum written up, and this is the one that produced the “non-traditional prosecution recommendation.” Barr’s sanitized version.  From the Washington Post:

A federal appeals court has ordered the release of a secret Justice Department memo discussing whether President Donald Trump obstructed the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The unanimous panel decision issued Friday echoes that of a lower court judge, Amy Berman Jackson, who last year accused the Justice Department of dishonesty in its justifications for keeping the memo hidden.

Department officials argued that the document was protected because it concerned internal deliberations over whether to charge Trump with obstructing special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe of the 2016 Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia.

The memo was written by two senior Justice Department officials for then-attorney general William P. Barr, who subsequently told Congress that there was not enough evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s inquiry. A redacted version was released last year but left under seal the legal and factual analysis.

The legal and factual analysis that Judge Amy Berman-Jackson called deeply disingenuous. The appellate court wrote:

The court’s … review of the memorandum revealed that the Department in fact never considered bringing a charge,” the panel wrote. “Instead, the memorandum concerned a separate decision that had gone entirely unmentioned by the government in its submissions to the court—what, if anything, to say to Congress and the public about the Mueller Report.

In other words, this is the memo that led Barr to call Mueller’s findings on obstruction of justice a “non-traditional prosecutorial conclusion…” instead of saying that Mueller found a crime.

Now, absent a SCOTUS appeal – usually unlikely, but with this SCOTUS’s subservience to Trump… – we will see the memo. At least, that is how it now stands.

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jmiciak@yahoo.com, @JasonMiciak, with Nicole Hickman