And further explanations on what the current blow back from 1) Judge Reggie Walton might mean with regard to uncovering what an unredacted Mueller Report might exposeand 2) another FOIA request (Judge Kollar-Kotelly vs NSA Chief Admiral Rogers) that has gotten some legal traction as well 3) T’s suing of the NYT.
This from Heather Cox Richardson…who spells them out some more. Her newsletter - HCR Newsletter
1)
Trump is worried how the economic slump will affect his reelection and, meanwhile, the administration has taken two bad hits in courts this week over its election ties to Russia. On Thursday, Judge Reggie Walton, a George W. Bush appointee, wrote that Attorney General William Barr’s efforts to mislead the public over the Mueller Report into Russian interference in the 2016 election “cause the Court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary.” Walton is presiding over a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that asks the court to make the Department of Justice release the unredacted report, which has not yet been made public. Walton says he will read the unredacted report himself to see if the Justice Department’s redactions (that is, blacking out of sections) was reasonable, or simply an attempt to protect the president. “I have never seen an attorney general called out this way before by a judge for making misrepresentations,” Harry Sandick, a former federal prosecutor, told TalkingPointsMemo.
-
On Friday, in a different FOIA case, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the National Security Agency to let her see a memo of a conversation between Trump and former NSA chief Admiral Mike Rogers, asking Rogers to push back against news reports that the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia. Rogers’s deputy wrote the memo, and Mueller summarized it in his report. Transparency groups want to see it; Trump says it is classified under executive privilege. Kollar-Kotelly says she wants to see it to make a determination.
-
So Trump is fighting to retain control of the narrative for his reelection. The Trump Campaign has sued the New York Times , the Washington Post , and CNN for “false and defamatory statements” about the campaign’s apparent openness to working with Russia in 2020. The suits seemed designed to gin up the Trump base and to undercut stories of Russian intervention in the upcoming election, which experts say is already actively underway.
Walton: https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/05/politics/judge-mueller-report-barr/index.html
Trump lawsuits: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trump-camp-goes-after-cnn-op-ed-in-new-lawsuit-following-similar-nyt-and-wapo-suits
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/bill-barr-judge-walton-mueller-report-opinion-unprecedented
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/06/judge-russia-probe-document-123083