Barr’s Playbook: He Misled Congress When Omitting Parts of Justice Dep’t Memo in 1989 - Just Security

As soon as William Barr's name appeared as possible Attorney General Beltway-insider and old school ties syndrome began to seep into the commentary of normally level-headed commentators (names omitted to protect the guilty).  NYU's Ryan Goodman tells a story  that shows that Barr is a con artist, rather than the "rule of law" DOJ man that many serious commentators told us. - GWC

Barr’s Playbook: He Misled Congress When Omitting Parts of Justice Dep’t Memo in 1989 - Just Security: When Bill Barr was head of Office of Legal Counsel, he gave Congress the legal conclusions and reasoning of an important Justice Department memo but left out major portions of it. When the full memo was finally released nearly two years later it was clear what Barr had covered up, writes Ryan Goodman.

On Friday the thirteenth October 1989, by happenstance the same day as the “Black Friday” market crash, news leaked of a legal memo authored by William Barr. He was then serving as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). It is highly uncommon for any OLC memo to make headlines. This one did because it was issued in “unusual secrecy” and concluded that the FBI could forcibly abduct people in other countries without the consent of the foreign state. The headline also noted the implication of the legal opinion at that moment in time. It appeared to pave the way for abducting Panama’s leader, Gen. Manuel Noriega.

Members of Congress asked to see the full legal opinion. Barr refused, but said he would provide an account that “summarizes the principal conclusions.” Sound familiar? In March 2019, when Attorney General Barr was handed Robert Mueller’s final report, he wrote that he would “summarize the principal conclusions” of the special counsel’s report for the public.

When Barr withheld the full OLC opinion in 1989 and said to trust his summary of the principal conclusions, Yale law school professor Harold Koh wrote that Barr’s position was “particularly egregious.” Congress also had no appetite for Barr’s stance, and eventually issued a subpoena to successfully wrench the full OLC opinion out of the Department.

What’s different from that struggle and the current struggle over the Mueller report is that we know how the one in 1989 eventually turned out.

When the OLC opinion was finally made public long after Barr left office, it was clear that Barr’s summary had failed to fully disclose the opinion’s principal conclusions. It is better to think of Barr’s summary as a redacted version of the full OLC opinion. That’s because the “summary” took the form of 13 pages of written testimony. The document was replete with quotations from court cases, legal citations, and the language of the OLC opinion itself. Despite its highly detailed analysis, this 13-page version omitted some of the most consequential and incendiary conclusions from the actual opinion. And there was evidently no justifiable reason for having withheld those parts from Congress or the public.