“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 cause 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,” the judge added.

A DOJ spokesperson on Friday said in a statement that the "court’s assertions were contrary to the facts."

"The original redactions in the public report were made by Department attorneys, in consultation with senior members of Special Counsel Mueller’s team, prosecutors in U.S. Attorney’s Offices, and members of the Intelligence Community. In response to FOIA requests, the entire report was then reviewed by career attorneys, including different career attorneys with expertise in FOIA cases—a process in which the Attorney General played no role," the statement said.

Democrats have complained for nearly a year that Barr’s description of the report was skewed and that it altered the public narrative about Mueller’s conclusions. Shortly after Barr issued a letter describing Mueller’s findings, the special counsel wrote to Barr to complain about the framing and to ask that the report’s executive summary be released immediately.

However, Barr declined to allow what he called a piecemeal release of the report, which did not occur until almost a month after it was submitted.

Now, Democrats have a Republican-appointed judge endorsing Mueller’s view that Barr’s characterization led to confusion.

“The Court has grave concerns about the objectivity of the process that preceded the public release of the redacted version of the Mueller Report,” the judge wrote. “A review of the redacted version of the Mueller Report by the Court results in the Court’s concurrence with Special Counsel Mueller’s assessment that Attorney General Barr distorted the findings in the Mueller Report.”

Walton issued his decision in connection with two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits seeking the report and related records. One was brought by BuzzFeed and its reporter Jason Leopold. The other was filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

Justice Department lawyers asked that the judge bless the deletions from the report based on a declaration submitted by a department official. But Walton declined to do so and demanded that the department provide him an unredacted copy of the report by March 30, so he could see exactly what was deleted.

“These circumstances generally, and Attorney General Barr’s lack of candor specifically, call into question Attorney General Barr’s credibility and in turn, the Department’s representation that ‘all of the information redacted from the version of the [Mueller] Report released by [ ] Attorney General [Barr]’ is protected from disclosure by its claimed FOIA exemptions,” Walton wrote.

Walton’s claim that Barr displayed a “lack of candor” is likely to reverberate loudly within the Justice Department. That phrase has unusual weight in federal law enforcement, where such an accusation can and does result in dismissal. “Lack of candor” is specifically what former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was accused of before being fired by Barr’s predecessor, Jeff Sessions, in 2018.

The tongue-lashing Walton unleashed on Thursday was hardly the first time the judge has leveled criticism at Barr or the Justice Department. Even before the report was released last April, the judge said Barr’s description of it was sowing distrust in government among many Americans.

“The attorney general has created an environment that has caused a significant part of the public … to be concerned about whether or not there is full transparency,” the judge said at the time.

Walton also repeatedly teed off on the department for being slow to decide whether to drop its effort to pursue criminal charges against McCabe over statements he made to investigators.

Prosecutors finally notified McCabe’s lawyers last month that no charges were being brought. The formal word came on the same day as a deadline that Walton had set for the release of previously secret court records about the issue.

Transcripts made public that day showed that at an earlier, closed-door hearing the judge used extraordinarly sharp language as he slammed the Justice Department’s handling of the investigation of McCabe, who has been a frequent target of attacks from Trump.

“The public is listening to what’s going on, and I don’t think people like the fact that you got somebody at the top basically trying to dictate whether somebody should be prosecuted,” Walton said. “I just think it’s a banana republic when we go down that road.”