Former President Donald Trump celebrated the release of a Justice Department memo supporting Attorney General William Barr's decision not to prosecute him for obstruction of justice in the Russia investigation.
A cheeky statement released by his Save America PAC on Wednesday thanked the left-leaning government watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, for successfully suing to secure the release of the unredacted document more than three years after Robert Mueller’s inquiry came to an end.
"In the nine-page memo it was revealed that, 'Nothing would warrant a prosecution for obstruction of justice,'" Trump said. "It underscored that 'Mueller had not found sufficient evidence to charge any underlying crime,' and that the President 'reasonably believed that the Special Counsel’s investigation was interfering with his governing agenda.'"
"The memo :concluded that 'the evidence was insufficient to support a criminal charge — even if Trump were not president,'" Trump added. "It was stated that my 'conduct primarily reflected a frustration with the Mueller probe and what [I] perceived to be the politics behind it,' in addition to what I believed were absolutely flawed and Fake News reports. Sound familiar?" --->READ MORE HERE
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| Photo: mandel ngan/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images |
Document found the then-president hadn’t obstructed justice in special counsel’s probe of Russian influence on 2016 presidential election
The Justice Department has made public a 2019 legal memo recommending that former President Donald Trump not be prosecuted for obstruction of justice in connection with the special counsel’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, after a federal appeals court said the agency could no longer keep it secret.
In the nine-page document dated March 24, 2019, two senior Justice Department officials during the Trump administration said they had evaluated special counsel Robert Mueller’s report and concluded that the evidence wasn’t sufficient to establish that Mr. Trump had obstructed justice. The officials concluded that the former president’s actions, including firing former FBI Director James Comey as the Russia investigation intensified in 2017, didn’t rise to the level of a crime.
Mr. Mueller’s report “is not, in our judgment, sufficient to support a conclusion beyond a reasonable doubt that the President violated the obstruction-of-justice statutes,” wrote Steven Engel, the then-head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and Edward O’Callaghan, who was principal associate deputy attorney general. Addressing then-Attorney General William Barr, they recommended “that you decline to commence such a prosecution.”
The March 2019 memo was the focus of a long-running lawsuit by a nonprofit watchdog group, which argued the Justice Department had misrepresented it as having informed a decision the department had already made. U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson agreed in 2021, and an appeals court last week affirmed the judge’s decision and ordered the memo released.
The Justice Department made it public on its website.
Mr. Barr sent a letter to Congress on the same day the memo was written, citing it in saying that he had found that Mr. Trump’s actions didn’t amount to a crime. --->READ MORE HERE
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