JUDY WOODRUFF: Late last night, the Justice Department released a document that played
an important role in the decision not to charge former President Trump with obstruction of
justice. Our John Yang explores. JOHN YANG: Judy, the nine-page memo was sent to then-Attorney
General William Barr by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. That's the office
that gives legal advice to government agencies. Barr said it was the basis for his conclusion
that there was not enough evidence to establish that President Trump broke obstruction of
justice laws. A watchdog group sued to make it public. And, earlier this month, a judge
said it must be released. Well, last night, the Justice Department released a heavily
redacted version of it, and said it would continue to fight in court to keep the rest
of it secret. Noah Bookbinder is president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility and
Ethics in Washington, also known as CREW. CREW is the group that sued for the memo's
release. Mr. Bookbinder, thanks so much for joining us. You filed -- your group filed
this suit literally the afternoon of Attorney General Barr's news conference. What does
this struggle over this document, whether to keep it secret or not, what does this represent
to you, sort of the larger implications of this struggle? NOAH BOOKBINDER, Executive
Director, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington: Absolutely. Well, what
it looked like happened back when the Mueller report came out was that the attorney general
and people at the Justice Department reporting to him -- this is Bill Barr -- set out not
to do a real legal analysis of whether Donald Trump had obstructed justice, but rather to
publicly defend Donald Trump and to make the case for why he hadn't done anything wrong.
And that's why we wanted to see this memo that he said he relied on to make this announcement
that there was no basis to say that Donald Trump had obstructed justice. And the Justice
Department has fought for years to keep it from going public, I think, in large part
because it does show that there was a whitewashing to protect the then-president. JOHN YANG:
What did we learn? We got two -- we got a page-and-a-half, essentially, last night.
What did we learn in that page-and-a-half? NOAH BOOKBINDER: Well, what we did learn is
-- and we really got two things. We got that page-and-a-half, and then we got the full,
unredacted version of a federal judge's opinion talking about this document and about this
case. And from those two things, we did learn that the Justice Department lawyers essentially
said that what they were thinking about was not so much the legal analysis, but the case
that could be made to the public. And so it really was starting to kind of blow the lid
off of this and show that what we all thought was happening really was what was happening.
JOHN YANG: And Judge Amy Berman Jackson's ruling does have some pretty strong language
about the Justice Department. They said -- she wrote that she was -- she looked at the unredacted
memo. And she wrote: "The DOJ," the Justice Department, "has been disingenuous to this
court with respect to the existence of a decision-making process that should be shielded by the deliberative
process privilege." In other words, she's saying here that the -- that this is not a
decision-making process, because the decision has already been made. NOAH BOOKBINDER: That's
right. I mean, the way that she laid it out is, the Justice Department was clear that
they weren't going to prosecute Donald Trump. They believed their rules set out that you
couldn't prosecute a sitting president. So, essentially, this was sort of a P.R. Document.
This is, what should we say to the public? And for the Justice Department to come and
say this was some kind of deliberative pre-decisional document is not really honest, because there
wasn't a legal decision being made. And we really had hoped that, having gotten this
just absolutely scathing decision from Judge Jackson, that the Justice Department would
look at this and say, now is the time to really, really go for a clean slate and sort of admit
that the department, under Bill Barr, had been dishonest, behaved badly, and now it's
time to come clean, produce the document, and clean up the department, and show that
it's not going to be used for the protection of any president. And it's disappointing that,
instead, they have chosen to continue fighting this case. JOHN YANG: Noah Bookbinder of the
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, thank you very much. NOAH BOOKBINDER:
Thanks so much for having me.