As Attorney General William Barr continues his process of determining what should and shouldn't be made public from the final Russia report written by special counsel Robert Mueller, he has given the American public no reason to believe that accountability and transparency are foremost on his mind. In fact, Barr has done exactly the opposite.
Ever since he delivered four short pages to Congress on March 24 declaring Donald Trump cleared of criminality while providing none of the underlying evidence, Barr has repeatedly been forced to justify his actions. In his follow-up letter to Congress five days later, Barr claimed the four-page communication was never meant to be a summary of Mueller's 400-page report, even though he himself had characterized his first letter as an effort to "summarize" Mueller's principal findings. In that letter, Barr also detailed the redactions he was busily making to Mueller's report, including any information related to grand jury material, sensitive intelligence operations, ongoing federal investigations, and what Barr called "peripheral" people whose privacy could be violated. In effect, Barr was laying out a rationalization for his redactions that would provide him wide discretionary latitude.
But following reports that Mueller's prosecutors had prepared summaries of their work intended for public consumption with few, if any, redactions, Barr once again sought to justify his lengthy redaction process. A Justice Department spokeswoman claimed that "every page" of the report was designated as potentially containing grand jury material and "therefore could not be publicly released."
But that was nothing but a complete and total dodge. The grand jury marking is used liberally and doesn't necessarily indicate there's sensitive information on every page of the report. In addition, even if some details of the report aren't appropriate for public consumption, there's no reason Barr couldn't have turned the entirety of Mueller's findings over to Congress, which handles grand jury material and sensitive information all the time. In fact, Barr could have sought an immediate court order to make the grand jury information available to Congress.
“It’s disturbing there has been no announcement of any effort to ask the presiding judge of the grand jury to clear the material,” Walter Dellinger, a Duke University law professor and a former U.S. solicitor general, told the Washington Post. “The amount of legitimate redactions should be quite small,” he said. “I don’t believe there is any reason to redact any material for the sole reason that it is derived from grand jury proceedings.”
Every day that passes is another day in which Barr is slicing and dicing Mueller's report.
Not a single one of his communications to Congress thus far has been satisfactory enough that it didn't require a second effort to explain his actions. As another Duke law professor, Samual Buell, told the New York Times: "There is going to be an awful lot of redaction, and the question becomes, ‘What is Congress going to do about that?’ It seems to me that they can and should go to court. It’s not up to the Justice Department to make the final decision about what Congress sees.”