After running cover for Donald Trump last year, wildly mischaracterizing Robert Mueller’s Russia report in a four-page memo clearing the president, as well as in a press conference before a redacted version of the findings were released, anything William Barr redacted from the special counsel’s two-volume opus was going to raise eyebrows. Now, almost a year after his version of the report was released, a federal judge wants to get a look at what Trump’s hand-picked attorney general cut from the Mueller team’s original version.

In a blistering ruling Thursday, Judge Reggie Walton— a George W. Bush appointee—tore into Barr for “misleading” the public about the Mueller report, accusing him of working to create a “one-sided narrative...that is clearly in some respects substantively at odds” with the special counsel’s findings. Barr, he wrote, “distorted the findings in the Mueller Report.”

“The inconsistencies between Attorney General Barr’s statements...and portions of the redacted version of the 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,” Walton wrote.

The decision, notable for its direct broadsides on the nation’s top Justice Department official, came in response to a Freedom of Information Request suit from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a watchdog group, and Jason Leopold, a Buzzfeed News reporter, seeking access to the full Mueller report, which capped a two-year probe into Russia’s 2016 election meddling, along with the president and his allies. Citing a “lack of candor” that has thrown Barr’s “credibility” into doubt, Walton on Thursday directed the DOJ to turn over the unredacted report to the court for review. “Considering the record in this case, the Court must conclude that the actions of Attorney General Barr and his representations about the Mueller Report preclude the Court’s acceptance of the validity of the Department’s redactions without its independent verification,” Walton ruled.

That could be a major blow for the Trump administration. The Russia investigation had been a dark cloud hanging over the president for the first half of his term, ensnaring some of his top aides and allies—including former campaign chairman Paul Manafort and longtime adviser Roger Stone—and seemingly posing both a personal legal and political threat. But Barr released a top-line summary of Mueller’s findings quickly after the special counsel submitted his report, clearing the Trump campaign of criminal coordination with the Kremlin and the president of obstructing the investigation. But Mueller’s investigators disputed how he characterized their work, which the attorney general doubled down on in a press conference before releasing a redacted version of the report. “The president was frustrated,” Barr said, explaining Trump’s public and private efforts to kneecap his investigators.

Even the redacted report contradicted Barr’s assessment, revealing that Mueller found the Trump campaign had multiple contacts with Moscow and welcomed its meddling, and that the obstructive behavior prosecutors outlined went far beyond that of a “frustrated” president. Whether the redacted portions of the report would be similarly damning is unclear. Perhaps there’s nothing inappropriate and Barr just redacted classified material, as he said he did. But in acting as Trump’s “Roy Cohn” rather than attorney general, he eroded trust in his judgment and neutrality. “The Court has grave concerns about the objectivity of the process that preceded the public release of the redacted version of the Mueller Report,” Walton wrote.

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