Court Orders New Mueller Report Disclosures to EPIC by Feb. 25

A federal court, ruling in EPIC v. DOJ, has ordered the Department of Justice to disclose new material from the Mueller Report by February 25. Judge Reggie B. Walton’s order follows a recent D.C. Circuit ruling in an appeal brought by Jason Leopold and BuzzFeed, whose Freedom of Information Act suit for the Mueller Report was consolidated with EPIC’s case. Leopold and BuzzFeed challenged the lower court’s determination that the DOJ could withhold information about individuals investigated by Special Counsel Robert Mueller but not charged with a crime. The D.C. Circuit ruled that the DOJ must release several passages of the Report about individuals investigated for campaign finance violations, as those sections “would show only government decisionmaking, not new private information.” As a result of EPIC’s 2019 lawsuit for the Mueller Report, the Justice Department was forced on three prior occasions to disclose portions of the Report that it initially withheld from the public. Judge Walton conducted an in camera review of the unredacted Report before ruling in the case—a step that Walton deemed necessary after determining that Attorney General Bill Barr’s redactions to the Report may have been “self-serving.” EPIC’s Freedom of Information Act case—the first in the nation for the disclosure of the Mueller Report—is EPIC v. DOJ, No. 19-810.