A federal judge just laid the smackdown on the Trump administration. Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Yesterday, a federal judge ordered the Department of Justice to hand over the full unredacted Mueller report so that the judge could go through it and determine if the redacted portions are in fact redacted for a reason and therefore should or should not be subjected to freedom of information act requests. This lawsuit was spurred by a FOIA request from investigative journalist, Jason Leopold, along with the electronic privacy information center and Leopold works for Buzzfeed. They, they wanted to get their hands on the redacted portions of the Mueller report. They want to know what’s in there. The public has a right to know what’s in there. You know, we, we were dragged along this whole thing for two straight years. We deserve some answers and the judge seems to agree because in his ruling, the judge pointed out that he doesn’t believe William Barr when he came out a few days before the report was released, gave his little summary and cleared Donald Trump of any and all wrongdoing.
Then he releases this heavily redacted report that’s still showed Donald Trump committed some crimes here. And so the judge looked at Barr’s summary, looked at the Mueller report, even the redacted version and said, these two don’t add up. So what are you hiding from us in the redacted portions? Are the redacted portions contrary to what you say or are the redacted portions maybe the things that prove what you gave us in your summary? We have a right to know and before you think this is some crazy left-wing judge, this is a judge that was actually appointed by George W. Bush and he did not pick judges who even gave a hint of having any kind of liberal leaning whatsoever. Here’s a quote from the judge’s ruling. He says, the inconsistencies between attorney general Barr’s statements made at a time when the public did not have access to the redacted version of the Mueller report to assess the veracity of his statements and portions of the redacted version of the Mueller report that conflict with those statements, caused 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.
So it’s exactly as I explained it, Barr comes out, says all these things, clears the president of everything. We get the redacted version, redacted version says, yeah, there were crimes committed, maybe not the ones you thought, but we found some crimes, but Barr didn’t mention those. So we have a right to know and thankfully this Bush appointed judge actually agrees with us and that’s quite shocking. We wouldn’t expect this ruling from a George W. Bush appointee, yet here we are. This decision will be appealed. A higher court will eventually have the final say on this, probably the US Supreme Court and if they rule in favor of the Trump administration, then you can bet that probably within our lifetimes, the public will never get their hands on the unredacted version of the Mueller report.
