Mueller Report Details Highlight Trump’s Interest in Emails Damaging to Clinton
Mr. Cohen said that after Mr. Stone promised that WikiLeaks would soon release more damaging information about Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump responded, “Oh good, all right.” After WikiLeaks later publicized documents stolen from the Democratic National Committee, Mr. Cohen said Mr. Trump told him, “I guess Roger was right,” the report said.
The prosecutors also noted that Mr. Trump’s public comments about Mr. Stone and other witnesses and targets were an obvious signal. They “communicate a message that witnesses could be rewarded for refusing to provide testimony adverse to the president and disparaged if they chose to cooperate,” they wrote in a previously redacted sentence.
The Justice Department had withheld passages dealing with Mr. Stone in order, it said, to protect the ongoing criminal case against him. But the lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a watchdog group, and the BuzzFeed News journalist Jason Leopold challenged those and other redactions as violations of the Freedom of Information Act.
John Davisson, a lawyer for the privacy group, acknowledged in an interview on Friday night that much of the newly disclosed information “had come out, in one form or another” after the Mueller report was released. But, he said, “the delay, itself is harmful.” He also said he spotted redactions that were unnecessary and raised suspicions about whether law enforcement officials had wrongly withheld other information.
The Justice Department’s decision to release more of the text of the report came after the federal judge overseeing that case, Judge Reggie B. Walton of the District of Columbia, expressed suspicion about whether the redactions were justified and ordered government lawyers to provide him with the full report so he could review the redactions himself. The plaintiffs in the case argued there was no reason to withhold any information about Mr. Stone because his criminal case is over.
House Democrats have been separately seeking to review grand jury materials cited in the report. The Supreme Court in May blocked the release of that material while it considers whether to hear arguments in that case.
An appointee of President George W. Bush, Judge Walton has sympathized to some degree with the FOIA plaintiffs. He wrote in his March opinion that Attorney General William P. Barr’s overall handling of the Mueller report made him question the department’s motivations for redactions.
