The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) released a partial memo from 2019 this week, per a federal judge’s orders, detailing how former Attorney General Bill Barr did not stop charges of obstruction of justice charges against former President Donald Trump because there was no basis for charges in the first place.
The memo shows lawyers at the OLC suggested that the allegations brought against the former president did not meet the standard of obstruction even before Barr would’ve determined prosecution.
“We recommend that you conclude that, under the Principles of Federal Prosecution, the evidence developed during the Special Counsel’s investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense,” the memo, signed by Barr in March 2019, stated.
The OLC’s ultimate recommendation was that the DOJ “reach a conclusion on whether prosecution is warranted based on the findings in Volume II of the Special Counsel’s report.”
Democrats and their cronies in the corporate media who often peddle lies such as the Russia hoax hinted that Barr was somehow responsible for covering up Trump’s alleged wrongdoings but even after hearings, the Mueller report, and other events unfolded. The then-attorney general insisted there were flaws in the case for obstruction of justice charges, but the left dismissed Barr’s arguments.
The left assumed that Trump used his legal nominee to hide his own wrongdoings and that the release of this memo would prove that, but it ultimately proved the opposite. The Washington Post claimed the content in the memo is “likely to fuel and frustrate Trump’s biggest critics, particularly Democrats who have long argued that Barr stage-managed an exoneration of Trump after Mueller submitted a 448-page report describing his investigation into whether the 2016 Trump campaign conspired with Russia to interfere in the election, and whether Trump tried to obstruct that investigation.”
For months, Democrats hounded Barr to release the memo. It was only after Judge Amy Berman Jackson ripped into the DOJ and Barr over the memo, complaining that “[t]he fact that [Trump] would not be prosecuted was a given.”
She also accused the Trump admin of “getting a jump on public relations” by asking the attorney general’s advisers to create the memo in the first place.
