Judge orders review of Mueller report redactions – By Robert Legare (CBS News) / March 5 2020
A federal court in Washington ordered the Justice Department to submit the unredacted report of special counsel Robert Mueller for a private review to determine whether the redactions in the publicly available report were warranted. After the release of the redacted Mueller report last year, Buzzfeed and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed lawsuits against the Justice Department to force the release of the unredacted report under FOIA regulations.
In a scathing opinion from the D.C. District Court, Judge Reggie Walton criticized the Justice Department’s handling of the report’s release.
“The Court has grave concerns about the objectivity of the process that preceded the public release of the redacted version of the Mueller Report,” Walton wrote. He said that he shares the plaintiff’s concerns that the protocol leading up to the report’s public release may have been “dubious.”
Walton is also troubled by Attorney General Barr’s “lack of candor” in both his public statements and his initial summaries of the Mueller Report, which the judge says “call into question Attorney General Barr’s credibility.”
He questioned whether the disparity between the public statements and the redacted report was purposeful, an attempt to influence the reception of the Mueller report:
Contnue to article: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/judge-orders-review-of-mueller-report-redactions/
