question: Who gets to determine what is redacted in a Special Counsel report? How do we know they are doing it right?
comment: There were two versions of the report made. One for the general public, and a second for congress' eyes only. The one for the general public, the AG testified to congress that he used his own judgement to remove many categories of content. Some of it was required to be redacted by law, others was his choice. This is the version many people are questioning if he did it right, or if there were errors in the redaction. The second report prepared for congress eye's only, the AG said he redacted ONLY the grand jury elements, and left in everything else. Grand Jury testimony is protected by law because it is sensitive and is not a public record. Only three groups are legally permitted to review them: (1) Government attorneys who are working the case, (2) certain staff and others who are working with those attorneys using the grand jury testimony to enforce criminal law, and (3) certain special investigators for things like terrorism and financial crimes. That's called Rule 6(e). [Here is some more about that.]( URL_0 ) The Attorney General can view the testimony because he's the first person on that list. Limited members of his staff can view the report because they're the second group on the list. But Congress is not on the list of three groups allowed in Rule 6(e). The rule can be overturned if a federal judge overseeing the situation rules it is necessary. Without a court order or a change to the law adding Congress to the list of exceptions, it would be illegal for the AG to release the grand jury testimony.
passages: Barr described the four kinds of redactions in the released report: "harm to ongoing matter" (HOM) in , "personal privacy" (PP) in , "investigative technique" (IT) in , and "grand jury" material in . Of those, only the grand jury redactions are required by law due to 6(e) of United States criminal procedure. Barr characterized the report as being "lightly redacted".
  
  Section::::Public release of redacted report.:Redacted report findings compared to Barr letter.
   Barr also mentioned that Trump's legal team received the redacted version of the report earlier in the week, adding that the president's lawyers "were not permitted to make, and did not request, any redactions". Barr said that the "president confirmed that, in the interests of transparency and full disclosure to the American people, he would not assert privilege over the special counsel's report".
   On April 18, 2019, a redacted version of the special counsel's report was released to Congress and the public. About one-eighth of the lines are redacted. The report is 448 pages long across two volumes and four appendices. It contains about 200,000 words and over 1,100 footnotes. About 11% of the text is redacted. 40% of the pages had at least one redaction, and there were over 900 redacted text blocks in all.
   Section::::Conclusions.:Release of redacted report.
  
  On April 18, 2019, a redacted version of the Special Counsel's report titled "Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election," was released to Congress and the public. About one-eighth of the lines in the public version were redacted. The report was in two volumes, the first about Russian interference in the election and potential involvement of Trump associates, and the second on possible obstruction of justice by Trump.
  
  Section::::Conclusions.:Release of redacted report.:Russian interference.
   A less-redacted version of the report "with all redactions removed except those relating to grand-jury information", which is required to be redacted by federal law, is expected to be available two weeks after the initial public release, to "a bipartisan group of leaders from several Congressional committees".
   Only a limited number of copies of the full report were made, and Human Rights workers are concerned that the CIA might succeed in destroying all copies of this report they found so embarrassing. 
  
  On December 29, 2016, less than a month before the end of the Obama administration, District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the preservation of the full classified report, in case it was needed during the prosecution or appeal of senior suspects during their Guantanamo Military Commissions.
  
  Section::::Reception.:Media.
   On April 9, Attorney General Barr appeared in a congressional hearing before the House. There, Representative Charlie Crist described media reports that "members of the special counsel's team are frustrated at some level with the limited information included in your March 24 letter, that it does not adequately or accurately portray the [Mueller] report's findings". Crist asked Barr: "Do you know what they are referencing with that?", Barr replied: "No, I don't. I think I think I suspect that they probably wanted more put out, but in my view, I was not interested in putting out summaries".
   Section::::Conclusions.:Congressional requests for full report.
  
  On April 3, 2019, the House Judiciary Committee, which did not receive the unredacted report by its April 2 deadline, voted 24-17 along party lines to approve a resolution which authorizes subpoenas of the full report. The resolution also authorized subpoenas related to five of President Donald Trump's former top advisers, including strategist Steve Bannon, communications director Hope Hicks, chief of staff Reince Priebus, former-White House counsel Donald McGahn and counsel Annie Donaldson.
   The Mueller Report (March 2019, Vol. II, p. 1) cited the Moss memorandum in partial justification of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's decision not to indict President Donald Trump. "Given the role of the Special Counsel as an attorney in the Department of Justice and the framework of the Special Counsel regulations, see 28 U.S.C. § 515; 28 C.F.R. § 600.7(a), this Office accepted OLC's legal conclusion for the purpose of exercising prosecutorial jurisdiction."
  
  Section::::Federal judicial service.
   The 6000 page report had taken Intelligence Committee Staff years to prepare. A 600-page unclassified summary was published in December 2014, when Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein chaired the committee, against the extreme objections of the Committee's Republican minority. Its publication stirred controversy. Limited numbers of full copies of the classified report had been made, and human rights workers were concerned that the CIA would work to have all copies of this important document destroyed, because it was so embarrassing. Lamberth's ruling helped make sure attempts to destroy all copies of the report would fail.
  
  Section::::Notable cases.:James Rosen search warrants.
   After President Donald Trump fired FBI director James Comey in May 2017, Acting FBI director Andrew McCabe held high-level discussions within the Justice Department about approaching Vice President Michael Pence and the Cabinet about possibly invoking Section 4. It is unclear whether any Cabinet members were in fact approached. On March 15, 2019, Senator Lindsey Graham announced the Senate Judiciary Committee would investigate the discussions and seek related documents.
  
  Section::::Historical background.
  
  The ambiguities in Article II, Section 1, Clause 6 of the Constitution regarding death, removal, or disability of the president created difficulties several times:
   The Special Counsel law requires a special counsel to confidentially provide the current attorney general with a report of findings. The attorney general, in this case William Barr, is then required to provide a summary of the findings to Congress, although he has considerable discretion in how much detail he provides. The full release of the Mueller findings to Congress and the public is not assured. Should Congress be dissatisfied with the summary it is provided, it could subpoena Mueller's full report, and, if necessary, sue in federal court. Congress could also call Mueller to testify.
   Barr wrote that his letter provided "the principal conclusions" of the Mueller Report. Ryan Goodman, a professor at the New York University School of Law and co-editor of "Just Security", observed that in 1989 Barr also wrote a letter which he stated contained "the principal conclusions" of a controversial legal opinion he worked on as head of the OLC. Barr declined to provide the full opinion to Congress, but it was later subpoenaed and released to the public, showing that the summary letter did not fully disclose the principal conclusions.
   Attributes of the report's text, and its redactions in particular, received significant news coverage and was a noted talking point. Redactions were concentrated on areas about Russian government interference in the elections. The four types of redactions had the following statistics:
  
  BULLET::::- "Harm to ongoing matter" – over 400 redactions and about 45% of the redacted text overall.
  
  BULLET::::- "Personal privacy" – an estimated 5–7% of the redactions.
  
  BULLET::::- "Investigative technique" – an estimated 8–10% of the redactions.
  
  BULLET::::- "Grand jury" – over 300 redactions and about 38% of the redacted text overall.
   On April 18, 2019, a two-volume redacted version of the Special Counsel's report titled "Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 Presidential Election," was released to Congress and the public. About one-eighth of the lines in the public version were redacted.
   In the Barr press conference on April 18, prior to the release of the redacted report, Barr said that "the White House fully cooperated with the Special Counsel's investigation". However, Factcheck.org describes that this was "contradicted in the report", which stated that Trump had attacked the investigation in public, tried to control the investigation in private, and encouraged witnesses not to cooperate both in public and private. Factcheck.org also describes the report as saying that President Trump did not fully cooperate for interview requests by investigators, then in written responses answered that he did not remember to over 30 questions, while other answers were "incomplete or imprecise". Investigators protested that the written responses denied them the opportunity to ask follow-up questions, but Trump denied another request for an interview.
   In fact, the Administration's reluctance to release documents requested by the Committee almost ignited a constitutional crisis in 1975. Newly declassified documents from the National Security Archive demonstrate the highly contentious nature of this conflict, showing the CIA’s refusal to comply with the Pike Committee’s requests for information. Ultimately, when the Pike Committee was preparing to sue for the documents’ release, the CIA determined the likelihood of winning the lawsuit was remote, and Ford was able to orchestrate a compromise. The Agency would release the requested documents “on loan” to the Committee, and if there were disagreements about a specific document, the President would have the final say. The Pike Committee was then able to proceed with their investigation, and generated a report.
   Section::::The CIA and the Administration "stone wall" and "deceive".
  
  The Pike Committee’s demands for information were resisted and stalled by US President Gerald Ford's Administration. The eventual report produced by the Pike Committee described the Administration's sandbagging this way: “when legal proceedings were not in the offing, the access experience was frequently one of foot-dragging, stone-walling, and careful deception.” 
   On May 8, 2019, Trump asserted that all materials requested by Congress, including the unredacted Mueller report, are sheltered by executive privilege. This was a "protective assertion" of executive privilege to prevent Congress from receiving the unredacted Mueller Report and its underlying material for the time being, pending his decision to make a "final assertion" of executive privilege. Previously on April 18, Barr had said that the "president confirmed that, in the interests of transparency and full disclosure to the American people, he would not assert privilege over the special counsel's report".
  
  Section::::Subsequent actions with Congress.:House Judiciary Committee.
   On March 22, 2019, the special counsel's office concluded their investigation and sent a report to the Department of Justice where it was received by Attorney General William Barr. Barr, at Trump's nomination, had become Attorney General on February 14, 2019, gaining oversight of the investigation from Trump-appointed Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker. Whitaker had assumed oversight from Rosenstein on November 7, 2018, after the resignation of then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had recused from the investigation. Both Barr and Whitaker had been critical of the Mueller investigation before their appointments. Barr has faced bipartisan pressure to release the full report to the public, to the maximum extent permissible by law.
   In January 2014, CIA officials claimed that the Intelligence Committee had accessed review documents and removed them from CIA facilities in 2010 without CIA authorization. On March 11, 2014, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, confirmed that copies of portions of the review had been removed and transferred to a safe in the Senate's Hart Office Building. She argued that the action was necessary to protect the documents from the CIA, which had destroyed videotapes depicting brutal interrogation methods in 2005.
   The CBS television show "60 Minutes" interviewed Higazy in 2004, and the CBS website includes most of Higazy's allegations. A newspaper account of the redaction quotes the clerk for the appellate court stating that the decision to reissue the opinion in redacted format was not done at the request of the Justice Department or the FBI, and that the redacted information was originally sealed for the safety of Higazy and his family.
   Barr said the report would be delivered to Congress by mid-April, with some redactions of any information that would "potentially compromise sources and methods" or "unduly infringe on the personal privacy and reputational interests of peripheral third parties". A two-volume redacted version of the full report was publicly released on April 18, 2019. A less-redacted version of the report will eventually provided to a limited number of members of Congress.
  
  Section::::Grand juries.
   On April 19, 2019, House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerry Nadler issued a subpoena for the fully unredacted report. A DOJ spokesperson called Nadler's subpoena "premature and unnecessary", citing that the publicly released version of the report had "minimal redactions" and that Barr had already made arrangements for Nadler and other lawmakers to review a version with fewer redactions. Barr offered to let twelve designated members of Congress view the less-redacted report in a secure room at the Justice Department, and forbid them from sharing the contents with other legislators. Several Republicans took advantage of the offer; the six Democrats refused, saying the conditions were too stringent.
   Barr gave the following elaboration on his decision that the evidence was insufficient to warrant an obstruction of justice charge for Trump: "Although the deputy attorney general [Rod Rosenstein] and I disagreed with some of the special counsel's legal theories and felt that some of the episodes examined did not amount to obstruction as a matter of law, we did not rely solely on that in making our decision. Instead, we accepted the special counsel's legal framework for purposes of our analysis and evaluated the evidence as presented by the special counsel in reaching our conclusion".
  