U.S. Attorney General William Barr listens to concerns raised about public safety in rural Alaska during at a roundtable discussion at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium on Wednesday, May 29, 2019, in Anchorage, Alaska. Barr did not take questions from reporters in his first public appearance after former special prosecutor Robert Mueller spoke to reporters after resigning at the completion of his report into Russian interference into the 2016 election. (AP Photo/Mark Thiessen)
Yesterday, we were entertained by a rare and unseemly event. In a routine action on a FOIA suit demanding the Department of Justice release an unredacted version of the Mueller report on the Russia Hoax. For the record, I’m 100% in favor of that. There is nothing in there that has an impact on national security and all the redactions do is allow parties who should be named and shamed and driven from the federal bureaucracy to skate and it allows the morons on the left to continue to push this hoax as though it is something other than what it obviously was, that would be a blatant attempt by the FBI and elements of the Intelligence Community and Department of Justice to bring down a lawfully elected president.
Rather than issuing a decision, US District Court Judge Reggie Walton actually lost his sh** and went into an unhinged rant accusing Attorney General Bill Barr of deceiving the court.
A federal judge on Thursday sharply criticized Attorney General William P. Barr’s handling of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, saying that Mr. Barr put forward a “distorted” and “misleading” account of its findings and lacked credibility on the topic.
Mr. Barr could not be trusted, Judge Reggie B. Walton said, citing “inconsistencies” between the attorney general’s statements about the report when it was secret and its actual contents that turned out to be more damaging to President Trump. Mr. Barr’s “lack of candor” called into question his “credibility and, in turn, the department’s” assurances to the court, Judge Walton said.
The judge ordered the Justice Department to privately show him the portions of the report that were censored in the publicly released version so he could independently verify the justifications for those redactions. The ruling came in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking a full-text version of the report.
…
In addition, Mr. Barr told the public in March that Mr. Mueller had made no decision about whether the president obstructed justice, then pronounced Mr. Trump cleared of those suspicions.
But Mr. Barr “failed to disclose to the American public,” Judge Walton wrote, that Mr. Mueller had explained that it would be inappropriate to make a judgment while the president was still in office about whether he committed obstruction crimes. The report also said that if the evidence had cleared Mr. Trump, Mr. Mueller would have said so, but he was unable to exonerate him.
“The speed by which Attorney General Barr released to the public the summary of Special Counsel Mueller’s principal conclusions, coupled with the fact that Attorney General Barr failed to provide a thorough representation of the findings set forth in the Mueller report, causes the court to question whether Attorney General Barr’s intent was to create a one-sided narrative about the Mueller report — a narrative that is clearly in some respects substantively at odds with the redacted version of the Mueller report,” Judge Walton wrote.
The judge also blasted similar “inconsistencies” in public comments made by Mr. Barr hours before he released the redacted version of the report in April.
Because of that pattern, Judge Walton wrote, he could not look away from the fact that the portions of the Mueller report that the Justice Department was withholding in the Freedom of Information Act case mirrored the deletions made under Mr. Barr’s guidance in the version of the report released in April.
That echoing, he wrote, causes “the court to question whether the redactions are self-serving and were made to support, or at the very least to not undermine, Attorney General Barr’s public statements and whether the department engaged in post-hoc rationalization to justify Attorney General Barr’s positions.”
This is nothing short of Walton going full metal #Resistance and becoming a Russia-Hoax-truther. It is a cynical and calculated political cheap shot at the Attorney General for apparently causing the good judge a case of the Hershey squirts over bringing the bullsh**, contrived, and possibly illegal investigation by Mueller to a conclusion. Despite the cheering for Walton from the Hoaxers, the fact remains that tomorrow Bill Barr will be Attorney General and Walton will still be a deadweight federal judge.
The Department of Justice is not taking this lying down.
DOJ statement on yesterday’s district court order in a FOIA case related to the Special Counsel’s confidential report. pic.twitter.com/7C1bd7Rwir
— KerriKupecDOJ (@KerriKupecDOJ) March 6, 2020
All of this is true. Walton knows, unless he’s achieved Biden-esque levels of confusion, that Barr had nothing to do with the redactions on the report. That’s what makes this act so cheap and tawdry and pathetic. No matter what Barr said, the redacted report was released and you may not like how Barr framed some of the findings if you are a Stage 5 TDS sufferer, but you don’t have to. You can read the report.
But if the totality of the response by Justice is this press release, then it is showing these petty black-robed tyrants everywhere that it can be rolled with impunity. And that is not a good lesson to teach any rabid cur.
The correct response here, in my view, is to show this guy just where he fits in the food chain. Which is basically at the bottom. The worst thing Justice can do is meekly bend over and be buggered. Barr doesn’t work for Walton. In fact, Barr doesn’t work for anyone who works for Walton. If he wants to review the stuff, he can do what any other American citizen does. Apply for the security clearance necessary to see the material then grab the forklift to haul his fat ass down to the SCIF where he can read it by not take notes.