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      Apple Says It Turned Over Data on Donald McGahn in 2018

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      The company notified Donald F. McGahn II last month that it had been subpoenaed for his account information three years ago.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department subpoenaed Apple for information in February 2018 about an account that belonged to Donald F. McGahn II, President Donald J. Trump’s White House counsel at the time, and barred the company from telling him about it, according to two people briefed on the matter.Apple told Mr. McGahn about the subpoena last month, said one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the matter. Mr. McGahn’s wife also received a similar notice from Apple, the person said.It is not clear what F.B.I. agents were investigating, whether Mr. McGahn was their specific focus or whether he was swept up in a larger net because he had communicated with someone who was under scrutiny. As the top lawyer for the 2016 Trump campaign and then the White House counsel, Mr. McGahn was in contact with numerous people who may have drawn attention either as part of the Russia investigation or a later leak inquiry.Still, the disclosure that agents had collected data of a sitting White House counsel, which they kept secret for years, is extraordinary.And it comes amid a political backlash after revelations that the Trump administration secretly seized the personal data of reporters and Democrats in Congress from phone and tech companies while investigating leaks.Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill on Sunday ratcheted up pressure on the Justice Department and former officials to provide a fuller accounting of events. They called on the head of the Justice Department’s national security division, John C. Demers, and the former deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, to testify before Congress along with the former attorneys general Jeff Sessions and William P. Barr.A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did a lawyer for Mr. McGahn. An Apple representative did not respond to a request for comment.Apple told Mr. McGahn that it had complied with the subpoena in a timely fashion but declined to tell him what it had provided the government, according to a person briefed on the matter. Under Justice Department policy, gag orders for subpoenas may be renewed for up to a year at a time, suggesting that prosecutors went to court several times to prevent Apple from notifying the McGahns earlier.In investigations, agents sometimes compile a large list of phone numbers and email addresses that were in contact with a subject, and seek to identify all those people by using subpoenas to communications companies for any account information like names, computer addresses and credit card numbers associated with them.Apple told the McGahns that it had received the subpoena on Feb. 23, 2018, according to a person briefed on the matter.Under federal law, prosecutors generally need to obtain permission from a federal judge in order to compel a company like Apple to delay notifying people that their personal information has been subpoenaed, said Paul M. Rosen, a former federal prosecutor and a partner at Crowell and Moring.“There is a lot here we don’t know, including the facts and circumstances surrounding the request for the delay and what was presented to the judge,” Mr. Rosen said. But, he added, prosecutors typically need to prove that either notifying the person “would endanger someone’s safety, risk the destruction of evidence or intimidation of witnesses, or seriously jeopardize an investigation.”The subpoena was issued by a grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia, the other person familiar with the matter said.It is not clear why prosecutors obtained the subpoena. But several notable developments were unfolding around that time.The federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia was the center of one part of the Russia inquiry led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, that focused on Paul Manafort, a former chairman of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.Because Mr. McGahn had been the top lawyer for the Trump campaign in 2016, it is possible that at some earlier point he had been among those in contact with someone whose account the Mueller team was scrutinizing in early 2018.Notably, Mr. Manafort had been hit with new fraud charges unsealed in the Eastern District of Virginia the day before the subpoena. Subsequent developments revealed that Mr. Mueller’s investigators were closely scrutinizing some of his communications accounts in the following days.On the other hand, the Manafort case was largely handled in the District of Columbia, where he faced separate charges. Still, the Mueller team was also working with federal prosecutors in Virginia during that period on an unregistered foreign agent case related to Turkey and a business partner of Michael T. Flynn’s, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser who had also advised him during the 2016 campaign.It was also around that time that Mr. McGahn was involved in another matter related to the Russia investigation, one that included a leak.In late January 2018, The New York Times reported, based on confidential sourcing, that Mr. Trump had ordered Mr. McGahn the previous June to have the Justice Department remove Mr. Mueller, but Mr. McGahn had refused to do so and threatened to resign. The Washington Post confirmed that account soon after in a follow-up article.The Mueller report — and Mr. McGahn in private testimony before the House Judiciary Committee this month — described Mr. Trump’s anger at Mr. McGahn after the Times article and how he had tried to persuade Mr. McGahn to make a statement falsely denying it. Mr. Trump told aides that Mr. McGahn was a “liar” and a “leaker,” according to former Trump administration officials. In his testimony, Mr. McGahn said that he had been a source for The Post’s follow-up to clarify a nuance — to whom he had conveyed his intentions to resign — but he had not been a source for the original Times article.There are reasons to doubt that Mr. McGahn was the target of any Justice Department leak investigation stemming from that episode, however. Information about Mr. Trump’s orders to dismiss Mr. Mueller, for example, would not appear to be a classified national-security secret of the sort that it can be a crime to disclose.Yet another roughly concurrent event was a Justice Department investigation into unauthorized disclosures of information about the Russia inquiry. As part of that investigation, prosecutors sent Apple a subpoena on Feb. 6, 2018, for data on congressional staff members, their families and at least two members of Congress. Apple only recently informed those targeted because it had been prohibited from disclosing the subpoena at the time.Among those whose data was seized were two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee: Representatives Eric Swalwell and Adam B. Schiff, both of California. Mr. Schiff, a sharp political adversary of Mr. Trump, is now the panel’s chairman. The Times first reported on that subpoena last week.Many questions remain unanswered about the events leading up to the subpoenas, including how high they were authorized in the Trump Justice Department and whether investigators anticipated or hoped that they were going to sweep in data on the politically prominent lawmakers. The subpoena sought data on 109 email addresses and phone numbers.In that case, the leak investigation appeared to have been primarily focused on Michael Bahar, then a staff member on the House Intelligence Committee. People close to Mr. Sessions and Mr. Rosenstein, the top two Justice Department officials at the time, have said that neither knew that prosecutors had sought data about the accounts of lawmakers for that investigation.It remains unclear whether agents were pursuing a theory that Mr. Bahar had leaked on his own or whether they suspected him of talking to reporters with the approval of lawmakers. Either way, it appears they were unable to prove their suspicions that he was the source of any unauthorized disclosures; the case has been closed, and no charges were brought.Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday called for Mr. Barr, Mr. Sessions and Mr. Rosenstein to testify before Congress about the subpoenas. She said that what the Justice Department did under Mr. Trump went “even beyond Richard Nixon” but declined to say whether a congressional committee would compel their testimony.“Let’s hope they will want to honor the rule of law,” she said. “The Justice Department has been rogue under President Trump.”Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, called for anyone potentially involved in the subpoenas, including Mr. Demers, to testify before Congress. “The sins of the Trump administration just continue to pile up,” he said at a news conference in New York.“This was nothing less than a gross abuse of power, an assault on the separation of powers,” Mr. Schumer said, warning that if the men would not testify, lawmakers would subpoena them.He also called on Senate Republicans to join Democrats in voting for congressional subpoenas to compel testimony.On CBS, Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, called the allegations “serious” but said only that she was backing an investigation into the matter by the Justice Department’s independent inspector general that was announced on Friday.Katie Benner More

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      Garland Pledges Renewed Efforts to Protect Voting Rights

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      The attorney general’s commitment served notice to Republican-led states imposing new voting restrictions, and included a vow to protect the voting rights of people of color.WASHINGTON — Attorney General Merrick B. Garland laid out an expansive plan on Friday for protecting voting rights, announcing that the Justice Department would double enforcement staff on the issue, scrutinize new state laws that seek to curb voter access and take action if it sees a violation of federal law.In his first public speech on an issue that has provoked intense partisan conflict in statehouses and in Washington, Mr. Garland served notice to Republicans pushing a raft of restrictive voting laws that he was determined to ensure the right to vote for all Americans.Mr. Garland did not outline any investigations or specific actions the department might take against states. Nevertheless, his pledge is an about-face from the department’s near abdication of voting rights enforcement under the Trump administration. Over the past four years, the department did not file any new cases under the Voting Rights Act until May of last year, a rare period of silence for one of the most consequential arms for protecting voting rights in the country.“To meet the challenge of the current moment, we must rededicate the resources of the Department of Justice to a critical part of its original mission: enforcing federal law to protect the franchise for all eligible voters,” Mr. Garland said in an address at the department headquarters.Mr. Garland made a specific commitment to protect the voting rights of people of color, reflecting a return to the traditional role the Justice Department has played in preventing discrimination based on race. Voting rights groups and civil rights activists have argued that many of the new voting laws would have a disproportionate impact on voters of color, and President Biden described the restrictions Georgia passed in March as “Jim Crow in the 21st Century.’’Without identifying specific states, Mr. Garland made an apparent allusion to the hourslong lines many Black voters faced last year in Georgia’s June primary elections, citing studies showing that “in some jurisdictions, nonwhite voters must wait in line substantially longer than white voters to cast their ballots.’’He also made a clear reference to Arizona’s Republican-led — and widely derided — recount of two million votes in Maricopa County, saying the department would scrutinize postelection audits “to ensure they abide by federal statutory requirements to protect election records and avoid the intimidation of voters.”In a statement Friday evening, the department said it had sent a letter to the Arizona Senate, expressing concern over, and explaining federal legal constraints on, the conduct of its continuing postelection audit.The drive to enact new voting laws has become a core mission of the Republican Party, as former President Donald J. Trump and his allies continue to peddle false claims about a rigged election and call for more states he lost to audit their results despite no evidence of fraud. Pledges to restrict access to voting under the banner of “election integrity” have become commonplace in fund-raising emails and campaign ads from G.O.P. candidates.Republican-led legislatures in several states including Georgia, Florida and Iowa have passed laws imposing new voting restrictions, and Texas, New Hampshire, Arizona and Michigan, among other states, are considering changes to their electoral systems. At the same time, hopes have dimmed on the left that Congress will pass two major election bills after Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, said he would not support abolishing the filibuster to advance such measures.Mr. Garland has said that protecting the right to vote is one of his top priorities as attorney general, and his top lieutenants include high-profile voting rights advocates such as Vanita Gupta, the department’s No. 3 official, and Kristen Clarke, the head of the Civil Rights Division. The division currently has about a dozen employees on its enforcement staff, which is focused on protecting the right to vote, according to a department official familiar with the staff.Despite his pledge, Mr. Garland is still limited in what he can do unless Democrats in Congress somehow manage to pass new voter protection laws. He can sue states that are found to have violated any of the nation’s four major federal voting rights laws. He can notify state and local governments when he believes that their procedures violate federal law. And federal prosecutors can charge people who are found to have intimidated voters, a federal crime.The Justice Department’s most powerful tool, the Voting Rights Act, was significantly weakened by a 2013 Supreme Court decision that struck down pieces of the act forcing states with legacies of racial discrimination to receive Justice Department approval before they could change their voting laws.Now the department can only sue after a law has been passed and found to violate the act, meaning that a restrictive law could stand through multiple election cycles as litigation winds its way through the courts.Any new steps to protect voting rights are unlikely to move quickly, said Joanna Lydgate, a former deputy attorney general of Massachusetts who co-founded the States United Democracy Center. “People will need to be patient,” she said.Still, progressive groups praised the announcement, which is seen as an important bulwark against the new voting laws introduced in all but two states that have Republican-controlled legislatures. There are nearly 400 in total, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive public policy institute that is part of the New York University School of Law.As of May 14, lawmakers had passed 22 new laws in 14 states to make the process of voting more difficult, according to the group.Democrats have filed lawsuits against some new voting laws, but that litigation could take years to wind its way through the courts and may have little power to stop those laws from affecting upcoming elections. And so far, the federal government has not joined the legal fight.“We need to make sure that the federal government is an active participant in protecting the right to vote,” said Tom Perez, a former Democratic National Committee chairman who led the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during President Barack Obama’s first term. “We can’t simply rely on private lawsuits.”Conservatives who have crafted and pushed for the new voting laws scoffed at Mr. Garland’s announcement.“Americans have been clear: they support laws making it easy to vote and hard to cheat in states across the country,” said Jessica Anderson, the executive director of Heritage Action, which helped write and then organized support for many of the new laws. “Despite the false narrative coming out of the White House and now the Department of Justice, Americans support secure, fair elections, even if the left does not.”The Justice Department’s curbed abilities to fight voter fraud were amplified under the Trump administration.“It was a really low point for voting rights enforcement,” said Wendy R. Weisser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center. “There’s a lot of ground to be made up obviously, and now there’s unprecedented challenges to voting rights.”During the 2020 election, the department publicly appeared to be more concerned with hunting for fraud than protecting voting rights. In September, then-Attorney General William P. Barr made numerous false statements about voting by mail in an interview with CNN, and amplified the importance of a minor ballot error in Luzerne County, Pa., making it appear as if it warranted a major fraud investigation.Mr. Garland expressed skepticism about the use of unorthodox postelection audits, saying they could undermine faith in the nation’s ability to host free and fair elections. He said that some jurisdictions had used disinformation to justify such audits.Assertions of material voter fraud in the 2020 election “have been refuted by the law enforcement and intelligence agencies of both this administration and the previous one, as well as by every court — federal and state — that has considered them,” Mr. Garland said.The Justice Department will publish guidance explaining the civil and criminal statutes that apply to postelection audits, as well as guidance on early voting and voting by mail, and will work with other agencies to combat disinformation, Mr. Garland said.Republicans have taken aim at specific pillars of voting access, particularly ones utilized during the 2020 election as voters sought safer options amid the coronavirus pandemic.In an effort to restrict voting by mail, they have sought to limit the number of drop boxes in multiple states, limit who can request mail ballots and add new identification requirements for absentee ballots.Republican legislatures are also seeking to greatly empower partisan poll watchers across the country. The role, which is meant to simply be an observational check granted to both political parties and all candidates, has grown increasingly controversial as party leaders, including Mr. Trump, have sometimes used militarist language to describe them.Mr. Garland said that the Justice Department had taken note of a sharp rise “in menacing and violent threats” against state and local election workers. Such threats, he said, undermined the electoral process and violated federal laws.Mr. Perez said the timing of the department’s involvement in voting laws was crucial. “The most important year in voting is always the year that ends in a 1,” he said. “That’s the year of redistricting, that’s the year in which there’s often a lot of change in state legislatures and that’s the year when you always have a dramatic increase in shenanigans.” More

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      Hunting Leaks, Trump Officials Seized Records of Democrats

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      The Justice Department seized records from Apple for metadata of House Intelligence Committee members, their aides and family members.WASHINGTON — As the Justice Department investigated who was behind leaks of classified information early in the Trump administration, it took a highly unusual step: Prosecutors subpoenaed Apple for data from the accounts of at least two Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, aides and family members. One was a minor.All told, the records of at least a dozen people tied to the committee were seized in 2017 and early 2018, including those of Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, then the panel’s top Democrat and now its chairman, according to committee officials and two other people briefed on the inquiry. Representative Eric Swalwell of California said in an interview Thursday night that he had also been notified that his data had subpoenaed.Prosecutors, under the beleaguered attorney general, Jeff Sessions, were hunting for the sources behind news media reports about contacts between Trump associates and Russia. Ultimately, the data and other evidence did not tie the committee to the leaks, and investigators debated whether they had hit a dead end and some even discussed closing the inquiry.But William P. Barr revived languishing leak investigations after he became attorney general a year later. He moved a trusted prosecutor from New Jersey with little relevant experience to the main Justice Department to work on the Schiff-related case and about a half-dozen others, according to three people with knowledge of his work who did not want to be identified discussing federal investigations.The zeal in the Trump administration’s efforts to hunt leakers led to the extraordinary step of subpoenaing communications metadata from members of Congress — a nearly unheard-of move outside of corruption investigations. While Justice Department leak investigations are routine, current and former congressional officials familiar with the inquiry said they could not recall an instance in which the records of lawmakers had been seized as part of one.Moreover, just as it did in investigating news organizations, the Justice Department secured a gag order on Apple that expired this year, according to a person familiar with the inquiry, so lawmakers did not know they were being investigated until Apple informed them last month.Prosecutors also eventually secured subpoenas for reporters’ records to try to identify their confidential sources, a move that department policy allows only after all other avenues of inquiry are exhausted.The subpoenas remained secret until the Justice Department disclosed them in recent weeks to the news organizations — The Washington Post, The New York Times and CNN — revelations that set off criticism that the government was intruding on press freedoms.The gag orders and records seizures show how aggressively the Trump administration pursued the inquiries while Mr. Trump declared war on the news media and perceived enemies whom he routinely accused of disclosing damaging information about him, including Mr. Schiff and James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director whom prosecutors focused on in the leak inquiry involving Times records.Former President Donald J. Trump repeatedly attacked Representative Adam B. Schiff, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times“Notwithstanding whether there was sufficient predication for the leak investigation itself, including family members and minor children strikes me as extremely aggressive,” said David Laufman, a former Justice Department official who worked on leak investigations. “In combination with former President Trump’s unmistakable vendetta against Congressman Schiff, it raises serious questions about whether the manner in which this investigation was conducted was influenced by political considerations rather than purely legal ones.”A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment, as did Mr. Barr and a representative for Apple.As the years wore on, some officials argued in meetings that charges were becoming less realistic, former Justice Department officials said: They lacked strong evidence, and a jury might not care about information reported years earlier.The Trump administration also declassified some of the information, making it harder for prosecutors to argue that publishing it had harmed the United States. And the president’s attacks on Mr. Schiff and Mr. Comey would allow defense lawyers to argue that any charges were attempts to wield the power of law enforcement against Mr. Trump’s enemies.But Mr. Barr directed prosecutors to continue investigating, contending that the Justice Department’s National Security Division had allowed the cases to languish, according to three people briefed on the cases. Some cases had nothing to do with leaks about Mr. Trump and involved sensitive national security information, one of the people said. But Mr. Barr’s overall view of leaks led some people in the department to eventually see the inquiries as politically motivated.Mr. Schiff called the subpoenas for data on committee members and staff another example of Mr. Trump using the Justice Department as a “cudgel against his political opponents and members of the media.”“It is increasingly apparent that those demands did not fall on deaf ears,” Mr. Schiff said in a statement. “The politicization of the department and the attacks on the rule of law are among the most dangerous assaults on our democracy carried out by the former president.”He said the department informed him in May that the investigation into his committee was closed. But he called on its independent inspector general to investigate the leak case and others that “suggest the weaponization of law enforcement,” an appeal joined by Speaker Nancy Pelosi.Early Hunt for LeaksSoon after Mr. Trump took office in 2017, press reports based on sensitive or classified intelligence threw the White House into chaos. They detailed conversations between the Russian ambassador to the United States at the time and Mr. Trump’s top aides, the president’s pressuring of the F.B.I. and other matters related to the Russia investigation.The White House was adamant that the sources be found and prosecuted, and the Justice Department began a broad look at national security officials from the Obama administration, according to five people briefed on the inquiry.While most officials were ruled out, investigators opened cases that focused on Mr. Comey and his deputy, Andrew G. McCabe, the people said. Prosecutors also began to scrutinize the House Intelligence Committee, including Mr. Schiff, as a potential source of the leaks. As the House’s chief intelligence oversight body, the committee has regular access to sensitive government secrets.Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director in 2017.Al Drago/The New York TimesJustice Department National Security Division officials briefed the deputy attorney general’s office nearly every other week on the investigations, three former department officials said.In 2017 and 2018, a grand jury subpoenaed Apple and another internet service provider for the records of the people associated with the Intelligence Committee. They learned about most of the subpoenas last month, when Apple informed them that their records had been shared but did not detail the extent of the request, committee officials said. A second service provider had notified one member of the committee’s staff about such a request last year.It was not clear why family members or children were involved, but the investigators could have sought the accounts because they were linked or on the theory that parents were using their children’s phones or computers to hide contacts with journalists.There do not appear to have been similar grand jury subpoenas for records of members or staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, according to another official familiar with the matter. A spokesman for Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee did not respond to a question about whether they were issued subpoenas. The Justice Department has declined to tell Democrats on the committee whether any Republicans were investigated.Apple turned over only metadata and account information, not photos, emails or other content, according to the person familiar with the inquiry.After the records provided no proof of leaks, prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington discussed ending that piece of their investigation. But Mr. Barr’s decision to bring in an outside prosecutor helped keep the case alive.A CNN report in August 2019 about another leak investigation said prosecutors did not recommend to their superiors that they charge Mr. Comey over memos that he wrote and shared about his interactions with Mr. Trump, which were not ultimately found to contain classified information.Mr. Barr was wary of how Mr. Trump would react, according to a person familiar with the situation. Indeed, Mr. Trump berated the attorney general, who defended the department, telling the president that there was no case against Mr. Comey to be made, the person said. But an investigation remained open into whether Mr. Comey had leaked other classified information about Russia.Revived CasesIn February 2020, Mr. Barr placed the prosecutor from New Jersey, Osmar Benvenuto, into the National Security Division. His background was in gang and health care fraud prosecutions.Through a Justice Department spokesman, Mr. Benvenuto declined to comment.Mr. Benvenuto’s appointment was in keeping with Mr. Barr’s desire to keep matters of great interest to the White House in the hands of a small circle of trusted aides and officials.William P. Barr brought a trusted prosecutor in from New Jersey to help investigate leak cases.Al Drago for The New York TimesWith Mr. Benvenuto involved in the leak inquiries, the F.B.I. questioned Michael Bahar, a former House Intelligence Committee staff member who had gone into private practice in May 2017. The interview, conducted in late spring of 2020, did not yield evidence that led to charges.Prosecutors also redoubled efforts to find out who had leaked material related to Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser. Details about conversations he had in late 2016 with the Russian ambassador at the time, Sergey I. Kislyak, appeared in news reports in early 2017 and eventually helped prompt both his ouster and federal charges against him. The discussions had also been considered highly classified because the F.B.I. had used a court-authorized secret wiretap of Mr. Kislyak to monitor them.But John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence and close ally of Mr. Trump’s, seemed to damage the leak inquiry in May 2020, when he declassified transcripts of the calls. The authorized disclosure would have made it more difficult for prosecutors to argue that the news stories had hurt national security.Separately, one of the prosecutors whom Mr. Barr had directed to re-examine the F.B.I.’s criminal case against Mr. Flynn interviewed at least one law enforcement official in the leak investigation after the transcripts were declassified, a move that a person familiar with the matter labeled politically fraught.The biweekly updates on the leak investigations between top officials continued. Julie Edelstein, the deputy chief of counterintelligence and export control, and Matt Blue, the head of the department’s counterterrorism section, briefed John C. Demers, the head of the National Security Division, and Seth DuCharme, an official in the deputy attorney general’s office, on their progress. Mr. Benvenuto was involved in briefings with Mr. Barr.Mr. Demers, Ms. Edelstein, Mr. Blue and Mr. Benvenuto are still at the Justice Department. Their continued presence and leadership roles would seem to ensure that Mr. Biden’s appointees, including Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, would have a full understanding of the investigations. More

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      McGahn Affirmed That Trump Tried to Oust Mueller

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      The former White House counsel testified behind closed doors last week about the former president’s attempts to interfere with the Russia investigation.WASHINGTON — Donald F. McGahn II, who served as White House counsel to former President Donald J. Trump, has told lawmakers that episodes involving him in the Russia report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, were accurate — including one Mr. Trump has denied in which the president pressed him to get the Justice Department to remove Mr. Mueller.A 241-page transcript of Mr. McGahn’s closed-door testimony from last week, released on Wednesday by the House Judiciary Committee, contained no major revelations. But it opened a window on Mr. McGahn’s struggles to serve as the top lawyer in a chaotic White House, under a president who often pushed the limits of appropriate behavior.“They don’t teach you this in law school,” Mr. McGahn said of one episode he witnessed in which Mr. Trump was trying to get his attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, to resign because he had recused himself from the Russia investigation.Mr. McGahn was a major witness to many of the episodes outlined in the second volume of the Mueller report, which focused on actions Mr. Trump took to obstruct the investigation. After then-Attorney General William P. Barr — who said none of those episodes amounted to a chargeable crime — released most of the report in 2019, Democrats subpoenaed Mr. McGahn, hoping for a dramatic televised hearing.But the Trump Justice Department fought to block the subpoena, leading to a protracted and complex court battle. It came to an end when the Biden Justice Department struck a deal with House Democrats to permit Mr. McGahn to testify, but under strict limits: It would take place in private, and he could only be asked about information in the public portions of the Mueller report.While the testimony was belated and limited, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York, portrayed it as important.“Mr. McGahn provided the committee with substantial new information,” Mr. Nadler said in a statement accompanying the transcript release. He added, “All told, Mr. McGahn’s testimony gives us a fresh look at how dangerously close President Trump brought us to, in Mr. McGahn’s words, the ‘point of no return.’”Mr. McGahn used that phrase when a staff lawyer for House Democrats grilled him at length about Mr. Trump’s efforts to get him to tell the deputy attorney general at the time, Rod J. Rosenstein, to remove Mr. Mueller over a dubious claim that the special counsel had a conflict of interest — which Mr. McGahn refused to do, believing it could “cause this to spiral out of control.”After Mr. Trump called him at home on a Saturday in 2017 to pressure him again to tell Mr. Rosenstein to oust Mr. Mueller, for example, Mr. McGahn testified, he was deeply concerned.“After I got off the phone with the president, how did I feel?” he said. “Oof. Frustrated, perturbed, trapped. Many emotions.”Fearing that conveying the directive might instead prompt Mr. Rosenstein to resign and touch off a crisis akin to President Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre during the Watergate scandal, Mr. McGahn instead prepared to resign if Mr. Trump did not relent. He told several colleagues at the White House about his intention, although not Mr. Trump himself. But the crisis instead blew over for a time.In his testimony, Mr. McGahn acknowledged that he was afraid that if Mr. Trump removed Mr. Mueller or otherwise interfered with the investigation, the action would be used to accuse the president of obstruction of justice. But he was also careful to frame his concerns as being about public relations, without acknowledging that any legal lines were ever crossed.“It didn’t mean the president was meddling, but certainly it would be easily made to look that way,” Mr. McGahn said.The internal furor over Mr. Trump’s previous attempt to oust Mr. Mueller reignited in January 2018, when The New York Times and then The Washington Post reported on the encounter.Mr. Trump was enraged and pushed Mr. McGahn to make a statement denying that the episode had happened, but he refused to do so — because, he said, The Times story was substantially accurate. (Mr. McGahn said that The Post’s follow-up to The Times story was clearer on one issue — whether he had conveyed his threat directly to Mr. Trump — because Mr. McGahn had been a source for The Post in order to explain that nuance.)Mr. McGahn had by then also already told Mr. Mueller’s team about the event — Mr. Trump had ordered him to cooperate with the special counsel — and he feared that Mr. Mueller would consider charging him with making a false statement to law enforcement officials if he contradicted his account.Mr. McGahn also called Mr. Trump’s claim that he never even suggested firing Mr. Mueller “disappointing,” because Mr. Trump “certainly entertained the idea. Certainly seemed to ask a number of people about it. Certainly had a number of conversations with me about something along those lines.”The fight over whether Mr. McGahn would falsely say that Mr. Trump had never asked him to have the special counsel removed by Mr. Rosenstein also led to a vivid moment in the Mueller report where Mr. Trump chastised Mr. McGahn for keeping notes of their conversations, saying it was not something that Roy M. Cohn — a notorious lawyer who was disbarred for unethical conduct, but who Mr. Trump admired — would have done. Cohn died in 1986.“I didn’t really respond,” Mr. McGahn said. “I’ve made my point. And this was not the first time that Roy Cohn has sort of — the ghost of Roy had come into the Oval Office, so it didn’t seem to be a point worth responding to and, you know, he’s the president, he gets the last word.” More

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      Meadows Pressed Justice Dept. to Investigate Election Fraud Claims

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      Emails show the increasingly urgent efforts by President Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results.WASHINGTON — In Donald J. Trump’s final weeks in office, Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, repeatedly pushed the Justice Department to investigate unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, according to newly uncovered emails provided to Congress, portions of which were reviewed by The New York Times.In five emails sent during the last week of December and early January, Mr. Meadows asked Jeffrey A. Rosen, then the acting attorney general, to examine debunked claims of election fraud in New Mexico and an array of baseless conspiracies that held that Mr. Trump had been the actual victor. That included a fantastical theory that people in Italy had used military technology and satellites to remotely tamper with voting machines in the United States and switch votes for Mr. Trump to votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.None of the emails show Mr. Rosen agreeing to open the investigations suggested by Mr. Meadows, and former officials and people close to him said that he did not do so. An email to another Justice Department official indicated that Mr. Rosen had refused to broker a meeting between the F.B.I. and a man who had posted videos online promoting the Italy conspiracy theory, known as Italygate.But the communications between Mr. Meadows and Mr. Rosen, which have not previously been reported, show the increasingly urgent efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies during his last days in office to find some way to undermine, or even nullify, the election results while he still had control of the government.Mr. Trump chose Mr. Meadows, an ultraconservative congressman from North Carolina, to serve as his fourth and final chief of staff last March. A founder of the hard-right Freedom Caucus, Mr. Meadows was among Mr. Trump’s most loyal and vocal defenders on Capitol Hill, and had been a fierce critic of the Russia investigation.Mr. Meadows’s involvement in the former president’s attack on the election results was broadly known at the time.In the days before Christmas, as Mr. Trump pressed the lead investigator for Georgia’s secretary of state to find “dishonesty,” Mr. Meadows made a surprise visit to Cobb County, Ga., to view an election audit in process. Local officials called it a stunt that “smelled of desperation,” as investigations had not found evidence of widespread fraud.Mr. Meadows also joined the phone call that Mr. Trump made on Jan. 2 to Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, in which Mr. Trump repeatedly urged the state’s top elections official to alter the outcome of the presidential vote.Yet the newly unearthed messages show how Mr. Meadows’s private efforts veered into the realm of the outlandish, and sought official validation for misinformation that was circulating rampantly among Mr. Trump’s supporters. Italygate was among several unfounded conspiracy theories surrounding the 2020 elections that caught fire on the internet before the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob. Those theories fueled the belief among many of the rioters, stoked by Mr. Trump, that the election had been stolen from him and have prompted several Republican-led states to pass or propose new barriers to voting.The emails were discovered this year as part of a Senate Judiciary Committee investigation into whether Justice Department officials were involved in efforts to reverse Mr. Trump’s election loss.“This new evidence underscores the depths of the White House’s efforts to co-opt the department and influence the electoral vote certification,” Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and the chairman of the committee, said in a statement. “I will demand all evidence of Trump’s efforts to weaponize the Justice Department in his election subversion scheme.”A spokesman for Mr. Meadows declined to comment, as did the Justice Department. Mr. Rosen did not respond to a request for comment.The requests by Mr. Meadows reflect Mr. Trump’s belief that he could use the Justice Department to advance his personal agenda.On Dec. 15, the day after it was announced that Mr. Rosen would serve as acting attorney general, Mr. Trump summoned him to the Oval Office to push the Justice Department to support lawsuits that sought to overturn his election loss. Mr. Trump also urged Mr. Rosen to appoint a special counsel to investigate Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company.During the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 attack, Mr. Trump continued to push Mr. Rosen to do more to help him undermine the election and even considered replacing him as acting attorney general with a Justice Department official who seemed more amenable to using the department to violate the Constitution and change the election result.None of the emails show Jeffrey Rosen, then the acting attorney general, agreeing to open investigations suggested by Mr. Meadows, and former officials and people close to him said that he did not do so.Ting Shen for The New York TimesThroughout those weeks, Mr. Rosen privately told Mr. Trump that he would prefer not to take those actions, reiterating a public statement made by his predecessor, William P. Barr, that the Justice Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”Mr. Meadows’s outreach to Mr. Rosen was audacious in part because it violated longstanding guidelines that essentially forbid almost all White House personnel, including the chief of staff, from contacting the Justice Department about investigations or other enforcement actions.“The Justice Department’s enforcement mechanisms should not be used for political purpose or for the personal benefit of the president. That’s the key idea that gave rise to these policies,” said W. Neil Eggleston, who served as President Barack Obama’s White House counsel. “If the White House is involved in an investigation, there is at least a sense that there is a political angle to it.”Nevertheless, Mr. Meadows emailed Mr. Rosen multiple times in the end of December and on New Year’s Day.On Jan. 1, Mr. Meadows wrote that he wanted the Justice Department to open an investigation into a discredited theory, pushed by the Trump campaign, that anomalies with signature matches in Georgia’s Fulton County had been widespread enough to change the results in Mr. Trump’s favor.Mr. Meadows had previously forwarded Mr. Rosen an email about possible fraud in Georgia that had been written by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who worked with the Trump campaign. Two days after that email was sent to Mr. Rosen, Ms. Mitchell participated in the Jan. 2 phone call, during which she and Mr. Trump pushed Mr. Raffensperger to reconsider his findings that there had not been widespread voter fraud and that Mr. Biden had won. During the call, Mr. Trump asked Mr. Raffensperger to “find” him the votes necessary to declare victory in Georgia.Mr. Meadows also sent Mr. Rosen a list of allegations of possible election wrongdoing in New Mexico, a state that Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani had said in November was rife with fraud. A spokesman for New Mexico’s secretary of state said at the time that its elections were secure. To confirm the accuracy of the vote, auditors in the state hand-counted random precincts.And in his request that the Justice Department investigate the Italy conspiracy theory, Mr. Meadows sent Mr. Rosen a YouTube link to a video of Brad Johnson, a former C.I.A. employee who had been pushing the theory in videos and statements that he posted online. After receiving the video, Mr. Rosen said in an email to another Justice Department official that he had been asked to set up a meeting between Mr. Johnson and the F.B.I., had refused, and had then been asked to reconsider.The Senate Judiciary Committee is one of three entities looking into aspects of the White House’s efforts to overturn the election in the waning days of the Trump administration. The House Oversight Committee and the Justice Department’s inspector general are doing so as well.Mr. Rosen is in talks with the oversight panel about speaking with investigators about any pressure the Justice Department faced to investigate election fraud, as well as the department’s response to the Jan. 6 attack, according to people familiar with the investigation.He is also negotiating with the Justice Department about what he can disclose to Congress and to the inspector general given his obligation to protect the department’s interests and not interfere with current investigations, according to a person familiar with the discussions. Mr. Rosen said last month during a hearing before the oversight committee that he could not answer several questions because the department did not permit him to discuss issues covered by executive privilege.Mr. Durbin opened his inquiry in response to a Times article documenting how Jeffrey Clark, a top Justice Department official who had found favor with Mr. Trump, had pushed the Justice Department to investigate unfounded election fraud claims. The effort almost ended in Mr. Rosen’s ouster.Last month, Mr. Durbin asked the National Archives for any communications involving White House officials, and between the White House and any person at the Justice Department, concerning efforts to subvert the election, according to a letter obtained by The Times. He also asked for records related to meetings between White House and department employees.The National Archives stores correspondence and documents generated by past administrations. More

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      U.S. Put Gag Order on Times Executives Amid Fight Over Email Logs

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      A push by prosecutors to secretly seize data about four Times reporters’ emails began in the Trump administration and continued under Biden.WASHINGTON — In the last weeks of the Trump administration and continuing under President Biden, the Justice Department fought a secret legal battle to obtain the email logs of four New York Times reporters in a hunt for their sources, a top lawyer for the newspaper said Friday night.While the Trump administration never informed The Times about the effort, the Biden administration continued waging the fight this year, telling a handful of top Times executives about it but imposing a gag order to shield it from public view, said the lawyer, David McCraw, who called the move unprecedented.The gag order prevented the executives from disclosing the government’s efforts to seize the records even to the executive editor, Dean Baquet, and other newsroom leaders.Mr. McCraw said Friday that a federal court had lifted the order, which had been in effect since March 3, freeing him to reveal what had happened. The battle was over an effort by the Justice Department to seize email logs from Google, which operates the Times’s email system, and which had resisted the effort to obtain the information.The disclosure came two days after the Biden Justice Department notified the four reporters that the Trump administration, hunting for their sources, had in 2020 secretly seized months of their phone records from early 2017. That notification followed similar disclosures in recent weeks about seizing communications records of reporters at The Washington Post and CNN.Mr. Baquet condemned both the Trump and Biden administrations for their actions, portraying the effort as an assault on the First Amendment.“Clearly, Google did the right thing, but it should never have come to this,” Mr. Baquet said. “The Justice Department relentlessly pursued the identity of sources for coverage that was clearly in the public interest in the final 15 days of the Trump administration. And the Biden administration continued to pursue it. As I said before, it profoundly undermines press freedom.”There was no precedent, Mr. McCraw said, for the government to impose a gag order on New York Times personnel as part of a leak investigation. He also said there was no precedent for the government to seize the Times’s phone records without advance notification of the effort.A Google spokeswoman said that while it does not comment on specific cases, the company is “firmly committed to protecting our customers’ data and we have a long history of pushing to notify our customers about any legal requests.”Anthony Coley, a Justice Department spokesman, noted that “on multiple occasions in recent months,” the Biden-era department had moved to delay enforcement of the order and it then “voluntarily moved to withdraw the order before any records were produced.”He added: “The department strongly values a free and independent press, and is committed to upholding the First Amendment.”Last month, Mr. Biden said he would not permit the Justice Department during his administration to seize communications logs that could reveal reporters’ sources, calling the practice “simply, simply wrong.” (Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department had gone after such data in several leak investigations.)The letter this week disclosing the seizure of phone records involving the Times reporters — Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eric Lichtblau and Michael S. Schmidt — had hinted at the existence of the separate fight over data that would show whom they had been in contact with over email.The letters said the government had also acquired a court order to seize logs of their emails, but “no records were obtained,” providing no further details. But with the lifting of the gag order, Mr. McCraw said he had been freed to explain what had happened.Prosecutors in the office of the United States attorney in Washington had obtained a sealed court order from a magistrate judge on Jan. 5 requiring Google to secretly turn over the information. But Google resisted, apparently demanding that the Times be told, as its contract with the company requires.The Justice Department continued to press the request after the Biden administration took over, but in early March prosecutors relented and asked a judge to permit telling Mr. McCraw. But the disclosure to him came with a nondisclosure order preventing him from talking about it to other people.Mr. McCraw said it was “stunning” to receive an email from Google telling him what was going on. At first, he said, he did not know who the prosecutor was, and because the matter was sealed, there were no court documents he could access about it.The next day, Mr. McCraw said, he was told the name of the prosecutor — a career assistant United States attorney in Washington, Tejpal Chawla — and opened negotiations with him. Eventually, Mr. Chawla agreed to ask the judge to modify the gag order so Mr. McCraw could discuss the matter with the Times’s general counsel and the company’s outside lawyers, and then with two senior Times executives: A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher, and Meredith Kopit Levien, the chief executive.“We made clear that we intended to go to court to challenge the order if it was not withdrawn,” Mr. McCraw said. Then, on June 2, he said, the Justice Department told him it would ask the court to quash the order to Google at the same time that it disclosed the earlier phone records seizure, which he had not known about.He described the position he was in as “untenable,” especially when it came to talking with Times reporters about chatter involving some kind of fight involving Google and a leak investigation related to The Times.The Justice Department has not said what leak it was investigating, but the identity of the four reporters who were targeted and the date range of the communications sought strongly suggested that it centered on classified information in an April 2017 article about how James B. Comey Jr., the former F.B.I. director, handled politically charged investigations during the 2016 presidential campaign.The article included discussion of an email or memo by a Democratic operative that Russian hackers had stolen, but that was not among the tranche that intelligence officials say Russia provided to WikiLeaks for public disclosure as part of its hack-and-dump operation to manipulate the election.The American government found out about the memo, which was said to express confidence that the attorney general at the time, Loretta Lynch, would not let an investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server go too far. Mr. Comey was said to worry that if Ms. Lynch made and announced the decision not to charge Ms. Clinton, Russia would put out the memo to make it seem illegitimate, leading to his unorthodox decision to announce that the F.B.I. was recommending against charges in the matter.The Justice Department under then-President Donald Trump, who fired Mr. Comey and considered him an enemy, sought for years to see whether it could find evidence sufficient to charge him with the crime of making unauthorized disclosures of classified information — a push that eventually came to focus on whether he had anything to do with The Times learning about the existence of the document Russian hackers had stolen.The long-running leak investigation into Mr. Comey was seen inside of the Justice Department as one of the most politicized and contentious, even by the standards of a department that had been prevailed upon in several instances to use leak investigations and other policies concerning book publication to attack former officials who criticized Mr. Trump.Throughout last year, prosecutors talked about whether or not to close the leak investigation into Mr. Comey, according to two people familiar with the case, in part because there seemed to be little evidence to show that the former FBI director had shared classified information with the press.Last fall, department officials discussed whether the investigation had run its course and prosecutors should draft a declination memo that would explain why Mr. Comey would not be prosecuted, one of the people said. But the F.B.I. and the career prosecutors working on the case wanted to keep the investigation open, the people said, and in January prosecutors obtained a special court order to require Google to turn over data on the reporters’ emails.With Mr. Trump soon to be out of office, the order was controversial among some inside of the department, according to two people with knowledge of the case. It was seen as unusually aggressive for a case that would likely end in no charges. During the transition from the Trump to the Biden administration, at least one official wrote in a memo that the case should be closed, according to a person familiar with the transition.In the court filings seeking to compel Google to turn over logs of who was communicating with the four reporters who wrote that story, the Justice Department persuaded the judge that the secrecy was justified because, as the judge wrote on Jan. 5, “there is reason to believe that notification of the existence of this order will seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation, including by giving targets an opportunity to destroy or tamper with evidence.”The Jan. 5 document does not acknowledge that the existence of the leak investigation into Mr. Comey and its subject matter was by then already known, because The Times had reported on it almost a year earlier. It is not clear whether the Justice Department told the judge about that article, or instead suggested that the inquiry was still a well-kept secret. More

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      Justice Dept. Fights to Keep Secret a Memo on Clearing Trump in Russia Inquiry

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      The move put the Biden administration in the position of defending the secrecy of a memo related to the disputed decision to clear President Donald J. Trump.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has decided to fight a legal battle to keep secret most of a Trump-era Justice Department memo related to Attorney General William P. Barr’s much-disputed declaration in 2019 that cleared President Donald J. Trump of illegally obstructing justice in the Russia investigation.In a late-night filing on Monday, the Justice Department appealed part of a scathing district court ruling that ordered it to make public the entire memo. Two senior department officials wrote the document at the same time that they were helping Mr. Barr draft a letter to Congress claiming that the evidence in the report, which was still secret at the time, was insufficient to charge Mr. Trump with a crime.The still-redacted portion of the document examines nearly a dozen episodes presented as raising obstruction of justice concerns that were detailed in the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and has at least two sections, according to two people briefed on it.One laid out potential legal theories under which Mr. Trump could have been prosecuted, the people said. The other examined whether the evidence for any of the episodes constituted proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The memo is said to conclude that no charge was viable.The decision to keep hiding that analysis from public scrutiny puts the Biden administration in the politically awkward position of trying to cover up a record that would shed new light on an act by Mr. Barr that Democrats consider notorious. But it also enables the department to defend two institutional interests: its ability to keep internal legal analysis secret and the actions of career officials whom a judge accused of misleading the court.The Justice Department did release the first page and a half of the nine-page memo. While Mr. Mueller had declined to render a judgment about whether to prosecute Mr. Trump because the department’s policy was not to charge a sitting president, the memo said that Mr. Barr should offer his opinion of the evidence to shape public understanding of the report.“Although the special counsel recognized the unfairness of levying an accusation against the president without bringing criminal charges, the report’s failure to take a position on the matters described therein might be read to imply such an accusation if the confidential report were released to the public,” wrote Steven A. Engel and Edward C. O’Callaghan, two senior Justice Department officials during the Trump administration.The department also consented to releasing additional portions of the ruling this month by Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in which she had labeled its previous filings to her about the memo as “disingenuous.” Portions of her ruling that discussed the first part of the memo had been redacted.The court on Tuesday unsealed a more fulsome version of the ruling. It revealed that Judge Jackson had also accused the department of having “deliberately obscured” material in the memo that contradicted the notion that Mr. Barr needed to offer a public opinion about the prosecutorial merit of the evidence amassed by Mr. Mueller. The exercise, she said, was instead “purely hypothetical” and fundamentally about “getting a jump on public relations.”Noting that she had discovered the existence of this first part of the memo only after she insisted on reading it for herself rather than relying on the department’s representations about it, Judge Jackson also wrote: “D.O.J. made a strategic decision to pretend as if the first portion of the memorandum was not there and to avoid acknowledging that what the writers were actually discussing was how to neutralize the impact of the report in the court of public opinion.”The new Justice Department filing apologized for — but also defended — its Barr-era assertions to the court about the memo. It said that department officials could have been clearer, but that they were nevertheless accurate on the central legal question: whether the nature of the memo was pre-decisional and deliberative and thus exempt from disclosure. Any missteps, it argued, did not warrant releasing the entire document.Mr. Barr’s claim that the evidence did not show that Mr. Trump had committed any chargeable crime of obstruction has been widely criticized as deeply misleading. Among other fallout, a government watchdog group, CREW, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in the United States District Court in Washington seeking disclosure materials about the matter, leading to the fight over the memo.The Mueller report itself — which Mr. Barr permitted to become public weeks after his letter to Congress created an impression that the fruits of the inquiry had cleared Mr. Trump of obstruction — detailed several actions by Mr. Trump that many legal specialists say were sufficient to ask a grand jury to indict him on charges of obstruction of justice.Those actions included Mr. Trump’s attempt to bully his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, into putting out a statement or writing a memo that would falsely deny that the president had directed him to fire Mr. Mueller — effectively falsifying evidence that would have contradicted Mr. McGahn’s witness testimony about that event.Mr. McGahn, who refused to relay directions to remove Mr. Mueller and to later falsely deny that episode, according to the Mueller report, will privately testify next week before the House Judiciary Committee about such matters.Mr. Trump’s actions also included dangling a potential pardon to his former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, to encourage him not to cooperate with investigators.Mr. Trump later pardoned Mr. Manafort, who had refused to cooperate with Mr. Mueller about certain key matters.Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2019, Mr. Barr offered some explanations for why he did not think charges were merited for a few of the 10 episodes that the Mueller report had recounted as raising obstruction concerns. One of the people said that testimony drew upon and dovetailed with the still-hidden portions of the memo.“We took each of the 10 episodes, and we assessed them against the analytical framework that had been set forth by the special counsel,” Mr. Barr said at the time. “And we concluded that the evidence developed during the special counsel’s investigation was not sufficient to establish that the president committed an obstruction of justice offense.”For example, several episodes centered on Mr. Trump’s use, or attempted use, of his power to remove subordinate officials in the executive branch. They included his firing in 2017 of the F.BI. director James B. Comey Jr. — the act that led to Mr. Mueller’s appointment — and his unsuccessful efforts to persuade subordinates to have Mr. Mueller fired.Mr. Barr testified that “as a matter of law,” the obstruction statutes enacted by Congress did not limit the president’s power to remove a special counsel.That view, which is contested, comports with his own sweeping theory of presidential power. Still, in the deliberations, department officials also focused on the lack of historical precedent for prosecuting a current or former president for firing a subordinate, the two people said.In his testimony, Mr. Barr also maintained that the evidence was insufficient to prove that Mr. Trump had deliberately sought to criminally obstruct the investigation, apart from legal theories.For example, Mr. Barr said, a major reason that Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey was his “refusal to tell the public what he was privately telling the president, which was that the president was not under investigation.” Mr. Trump’s rationale for trying to fire Mr. Mueller was a purported conflict of interest, and had Mr. Trump succeeded, Mr. Barr said, a replacement would “presumably” have been appointed.But the Trump Justice Department never made public its comprehensive analysis of all the episodes the Mueller report laid out. That is the analysis the Biden administration is seeking to keep secret.Judge Jackson had given the department until Monday night to respond to her order to disclose the memo — and, by extension, her finding that officials had been “disingenuous to this court” about its nature in court filings by arguing that it could be lawfully kept secret.In addition to officials omitting the existence of the first part of the memo in descriptions of it that were submitted to her, Judge Jackson also blasted the characterization of the document as pre-decisional. Mr. Barr, she wrote, had already decided not to initiate any prosecution of Mr. Trump when the memo was written, and it was instead about strategy and arguments that could be mustered to support that decision.In its filing, the Biden Justice Department said that the previous filings “could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused.” But it also insisted that the department’s “declarations and briefs were accurate and submitted in good faith.”The department also put forward a narrow view of the problems with its previous statements about the memo, focusing on imprecision about whether Mr. Barr had been considering whether to commence a prosecution of Mr. Trump at that moment — as it had suggested in some places — or whether he was opining on whether Mr. Trump could be charged after he left office.Although Mr. Engel and Mr. O’Callaghan completed the memo after Mr. Barr had decided to say the evidence would not support obstruction charges, the department argued that the legal analysis portion of the memo memorialized advice they had provided before Mr. Barr made that decision.“The government acknowledges that its briefs could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused,” the Biden Justice Department’s filing said. “But the government’s counsel and declarants did not intend to mislead the court, and the government respectfully submits” that any missteps still did not warrant releasing the entire memo.Katie Benner More

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      Justice Dept. Aims to Keep Secret Part of Barr-Era Memo on Trump

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      The Biden administration has decided to fight to keep secret most of a Trump-era Justice Department memo related to former Attorney General William P. Barr’s much-disputed declaration in 2019 clearing President Donald J. Trump of illegally obstructing justice in the Russia investigation.In a late-night filing Monday, the Justice Department appealed part of a district-court ruling that ordered it to make public the entire memo. It was written at the same time that Mr. Barr sent a letter to Congress claiming the evidence in the then-still secret report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, was insufficient to charge Mr. Trump with a crime.The Justice Department did release the first page and a half of the nine-page memo. While Mr. Mueller had declined to render a judgment about what the evidence added up to because the department’s policy was not to charge a sitting president, the memo said Mr. Barr was justified in making a decision in order to shape public understanding of the report. “Although the special counsel recognized the unfairness of levying an accusation against the president without bringing criminal charges, the report’s failure to take a position on the matters described therein might be read to imply such an accusation if the confidential report were released to the public,” wrote Steven A. Engel and Edward C. O’Callaghan, two senior Trump-era Justice Department officials.The Mueller report itself — which Mr. Barr permitted to become public weeks after his letter to Congress had created an impression that the fruits of Mr. Mueller’s inquiry cleared Mr. Trump of obstruction — detailed multiple actions by Mr. Trump that many legal specialists say were clearly sufficient to ask a grand jury to consider indicting him for obstruction of justice.Those actions included attempting to bully his White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, into falsifying a record to cover up an earlier attempt by Mr. Trump to fire Mr. Mueller, and dangling a potential pardon at Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, to encourage him not to cooperate with investigators.The new Justice Department filing also apologized for and defended its Barr-era court filings about the memo, which Judge Amy Berman Jackson had labeled “disingenuous,” saying that they could have been written more clearly but were nevertheless accurate.“The government acknowledges that its briefs could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused,” the Justice Department said. “But the government’s counsel and declarants did not intend to mislead the court, and the government respectfully submits” that any missteps still did not warrant releasing the entire memo.Mr. Barr’s claim — which he made weeks before releasing the Mueller public — that the evidence gathered showed that Mr. Trump did not commit a chargeable offense of obstruction has been widely criticized as deeply misleading.Among other fallout, a government watchdog group, CREW, filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in the United States District Court in Washington seeking disclosure of an internal memo about the matter.Earlier this month, Judge Jackson issued a scathing ruling in that case saying that the Barr-era Justice Department had been “disingenuous to this court” about the nature of the memo in court filings by arguing that it could be lawfully kept secret under an exemption for pre-decisional deliberations. She wrote that she had made the discovery after insisting that she read it herself.While the Barr-era Justice Department told her the memo concerned deliberations about whether Mr. Trump should be charged with obstruction, the memo itself showed that Mr. Barr had already decided not to do so, and the memo was instead about strategy and arguments that could be mustered to quash the idea. She ordered the entire document released.The Biden-era Justice Department had until Monday to respond. In its filing, it acknowledged that its earlier filings “could have been clearer, and it deeply regrets the confusion that caused.” But it also insisted that its “declarations and briefs were accurate and submitted in good faith.”The decision that Mr. Barr was actually making, the department said, was about whether to decide whether the evidence was sufficient to charge Mr. Trump someday — not whether he should be charged at that moment, since longstanding department legal policy is to consider sitting presidents temporarily immune from prosecution while they are in office.And, it said, the legal analysis in the second part of the memo — the portion it is appealing to keep secret — was, in fact, pre-decisional, even though the memo was completed after Mr. Barr made his decision, because it memorialized legal advice that department lawyers had previously provided to the attorney general. More