The Biden administration said Monday that it would appeal a judge's order directing it to release in its entirety a legal memo on whether President Trump had obstructed justice during the Russia investigation. But it also agreed to make a brief portion of the document public, the AP reports. US District Judge Amy Berman Jackson earlier this month ordered the Justice Department to release the entire March 2019 memo as part of a public records lawsuit from a Washington-based advocacy organization. She said the department, under Attorney General William Barr, had misstated the purpose of the document in arguing that it was legally entitled to withhold it from the group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. In a motion filed late Monday, the deadline for deciding whether it would comply with the judge's decision or appeal it, the Justice Department said that it continued to believe even that the full document should be exempt from disclosure.
Though the department agreed to release one section of the document, the lawyers asked Jackson to put her order on hold to give a federal appeals court a chance to review the ruling. The Justice Department turned over other documents to CREW as part of the group's lawsuit, but declined to give it the March 24, 2019 memo from the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel that was prepared for Barr to evaluate whether evidence collected in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation could support an obstruction of justice prosecution of the president. The brief portion of the memo that the department agreed to disclose shows that two senior Justice Department leaders advised Barr that, in their view, Mueller's evidence could not support an obstruction conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt. (Much more here.)
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