I am not a lawyer, but after viewing Judge Amy Berman Jackson's unredacted memo, I think it is pretty clear that Merrick Garland is not protecting Bill Barr.
The parts that I have highlighted here are the parts that were previously redacted; Garland agreed to unredact this.
/1
Unredacted: Jackson's clear opinion that Barr's DOJ was intentionally dishonest, concealing the content of the OLC memo and misrepresenting its purpose to the court.
Recurring theme here: Jackson exposed the OLC memo for what it was - part of a political PR strategy.
Unredacted: The memo was crafted - at Bill Barr's request - to "recommend" that Barr make a judgement call about Mueller's report.
Why? Because the underlying motivation behind the memo was, "getting a jump on public relations."
Unredacted [my own paraphrasing of the OLC memo]:
'Now that Mueller's hands are tied, and he can't do anything that might remotely be perceived as levying an accusation against POTUS, we "recommend" that you step in and tell the public what you want them to hear.'
Unredacted: Again, what they were trying to conceal here was that this was all about public relations - i.e. politically motivated.
(Even the redacted version of this section is extremely important; it showed that Barr, Rosenstein, and OLC worked together to deceive Congress):
Unredacted:
-"the agency [Barr's DOJ] was girding for a preemptive strike on the Mueller report"
-Section 1 of the DOJ memo didn't offer legal advice at all - it offered "strategic, political, and public relations," advice.
Unredacted (footnote):
The purpose of the DOJ memo "was to provide legal analysis to help shape the assessment of the Special Counsel’s report that the Attorney General was planning to announce for the reasons set forth in Section I of the memorandum"
i.e. help the PR effort.
Those are all of the redactions, so I will stop there.
As I said above, even the redacted version of this ruling/memo was damning, as it exposed DOJ & OLC coordination (collusion?) to mislead the public and Congress.
Check out @DirkSchwenk's thread on it
In addition to the above, Merrick Garland has agreed to release Section 1 of Barr's OLC memo. That is the section that Jackson took issue with, and is what we should want to see.
As someone who has long taken issue with "OLC memos" in general, I'm not clear about Section 2.
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