Sure but they got away with it anyway.

Judge says Barr “misled” aka lied about the Mueller investigation.

A federal judge in Washington accused the Justice Department under Attorney General William P. Barr of misleading her and Congress about advice he had received from top department officials on whether President Donald J. Trump should have been charged with obstructing the Russia investigation and ordered that a related memo be released.

That’s a terrible opening sentence/paragraph. The Times should worry less about wiping out the Oxford comma and more about a too-long one-sentence opening paragraph with too much context-free information lumped all together with no punctuation. I know the idea is overview first then details but the overview in this case sucks.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in Washington said in a ruling late Monday that the Justice Department’s obfuscation appeared to be part of a pattern in which top officials like Mr. Barr were untruthful to Congress and the public about the investigation.

You don’t say. Barr and other cronies lied to Congress about the Mueller investigation; we know. Too bad they got away with it, and then looked the other way while Trump triggered an almost-successful coup, and got away with that.

The department had argued that the memo was exempt from public records laws because it consisted of private advice from lawyers whom Mr. Barr had relied on to make the call on prosecuting Mr. Trump. But Judge Jackson, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2011, ruled that the memo contained strategic advice, and that Mr. Barr and his aides already understood what his decision would be.

The “private advice” crap is such crap. None of this was or could be “private” because it was all to do with Trump in his government job. (I get that it may be legit in legal terms, I’m just saying it shouldn’t be.)

She also singled out Mr. Barr for how he had spun the investigation’s findings in a letter summarizing the 448-page report before it was released, which allowed Mr. Trump to claim he had been exonerated.

“The attorney general’s characterization of what he’d hardly had time to skim, much less study closely, prompted an immediate reaction, as politicians and pundits took to their microphones and Twitter feeds to decry what they feared was an attempt to hide the ball,” Judge Jackson wrote.

What they could see with sickening clarity was an attempt to hide the ball.

The ruling came in a lawsuit by a government watchdog group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, asking that the Justice Department be ordered to turn over a range of documents related to how top law enforcement officials cleared Mr. Trump of wrongdoing.

A range of documents related to how the foxes guarded the henhouse.