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The Curious Cases of Judge Walton
A senior judge on the United States District of Columbia court is desperate to keep the Russia hoax alive, and is actively interfering in the 2020 election under false color of law, or is that what is really going on? Credit where credit is due. I am no fan of the Wall Street Journal, having ended my subscription well over a decade ago. Even given that the editorial board is still somewhat distinct from the news sections, it was truly remarkable that they would publish an editorial, under their name, condemning a federal judge’s attack on Attorney General Barr. Is the judge a fool, a partisan hack, or true believer?
Judge Walton’s Political Aside
He gets his facts wrong in a broadside against unpopular Bill Barr.The Editorial Board
Judges aren’t shy about criticizing prosecutors when they are displeased. But few would go as far as federal Judge Reggie Walton, who on Thursday used a procedural ruling to offer a needless and inaccurate opinion that seems dubiously political.
In a 23-page ruling demanding that the Justice Department turn over an unredacted version of the Mueller report, Judge Walton accused Attorney General William Barr of a “lack of candor.”
The WSJ corporatist spin is there in the sub-headline, “unpopular” among their ilk, and in the lawfare reaches of the Swamp, of course. However, the editorial board is brutally precise in its criticism of this political hack in black robes. Reading his official biography can tempt you to take the easy route, noting that he made his career as a Bush judge, suggesting he was one of the Bush family lieutenants even in the Reagan administration, or more accurately a member of the Bush wing of the Republican establishment. However, there may be a much stronger motive driving Judge Walton’s fraudulent ruling.
Judge Walton is demanding access to an unredacted copy of the Mueller Report, for the likely purpose of leaking or openly publishing properly redacted sections calculated to help the Democrats take back the White House this year. Judge Walton personally attacked Barr:
As noted earlier, the Court has reviewed the redacted version of the Mueller Report, Attorney General Barr’s representations made during his April 18, 2019 press conference, and Attorney General Barr’s April 18, 2019 letter. And, the Court cannot reconcile certain public representations made by Attorney General Barr with the findings in the Mueller Report. The inconsistencies between Attorney General Barr’s statements, made at a time when the public did not have access to the redacted version of the Mueller Report to assess the veracity of his statements, and portions of the redacted version of 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.
These circumstances generally, and Attorney General Barr’s lack of candor specifically, call into question Attorney General Barr’s credibility and in turn, the Department’s representation that “all of the information redacted from the version of the [Mueller] Report released by [ ] Attorney General [Barr]” is protected from disclosure by its claimed FOIA exemptions. Brinkmann Decl. ¶ 11 (emphasis added). In the Court’s view, Attorney General 20 Barr’s representation that the Mueller Report would be “subject only to those redactions required by law or by compelling law enforcement, national security, or personal privacy interests” cannot be credited without the Court’s independent verification in light of Attorney General Barr’s conduct and misleading public statements about the findings in the Mueller Report, id., Ex. 7 (April 18, 2019 Letter) at 3, and it would be disingenuous for the Court to conclude that the redactions of the Mueller Report pursuant to the FOIA are not tainted by Attorney General Barr’s actions and representations. And, despite the Department’s representation that it “review[ed] the full unredacted [Mueller] Report for disclosure pursuant to the FOIA,” Brinkmann Decl. ¶ 11, the Court cannot ignore that the Department’s withholdings under the FOIA exemptions mirror the redactions made pursuant to Attorney General Barr’s guidance, which cause the Court to question whether the redactions are self-serving and were made to support, or at the very least to not undermine, Attorney General Barr’s public statements and whether the Department engaged in post-hoc rationalization to justify Attorney General Barr’s positions.
Is this a senior moment for a senior judge? Is it merely Trump Derangement Syndrome? It certainly is not an umpire calling balls and strikes. Nor is it written with any concern for contradiction by publicly available facts, the facts that prompted the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board to clear its throat and the Department of Justice to go on the record with this:
DOJ statement on yesterday’s district court order in a FOIA case related to the Special Counsel’s confidential report. pic.twitter.com/7C1bd7Rwir
— KerriKupecDOJ (@KerriKupecDOJ) March 6, 2020
Let’s be clear. Judge Walton has not been accused of losing mental capacity. He is in the age range where those dread enemies begin to emerge in human minds, but no one is asserting this senior judge is entering senility. It is equally not credible to assign ignorance of long-established administrative procedures. His factual inaccuracies cannot be reasonably assigned to ignorance or mistake.
Let us read the official biography together, and then discuss the obvious.
Judge Reggie B. Walton assumed his position as a United States District Judge for the District of Columbia on October 29, 2001, after being nominated to the position by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the United States Senate. Judge Walton was also appointed by President Bush in June of 2004 to serve as the Chair of the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, a commission created by the United States Congress and tasked with the mission of identifying methods to curb the incidents of prison rape. The Commission completed its mission and submitted its recommendations to the President, the United States Congress, and the Attorney General for the United States in June 2009. The recommendations were substantially adopted by the Attorney General and have been implemented in Federal Bureau of Prison detention facilities; they remain under consideration for adoption by the Department of Homeland Security for implementation at federal immigration facilities and by federal, state and local officials throughout the United States. Former Chief Justice Rehnquist also appointed Judge Walton to the federal judiciary’s Criminal Law Committee, effective October 1, 2005, and he served on the Committee until 2011. In May 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts appointed Judge Walton to serve as a Judge of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is a 7-year appointment, and in February 2013, the Chief Justice elevated Judge Walton to the position of Presiding Judge of that same court.
Judge Walton previously served as an Associate Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia from 1981 to 1989 and 1991 to 2001, having been appointed to that position on two occasions by Presidents Ronald Reagan in 1981 and George H. W. Bush in 1991. While serving on the Superior Court, Judge Walton was the Court’s Presiding Judge of the Family Division, Presiding Judge of the Domestic Violence Unit, and Deputy Presiding Judge of the Criminal Division. Between 1989 and 1991, Judge Walton served as President George H. W. Bush’s Associate Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy in the Executive Office of the President and as President Bush’s Senior White House Advisor for Crime.
Did you see the obvious conflict? Judge Walton led the FISA court just prior to the illegal surveillance of the Donald J. Trump campaign, and of President Trump. He was the Presiding Judge, the senior member, in 2013-2014. Judge Walton told CNN, shortly after his seven year tenure on the FISA court, that he was sure that the court was doing the right things, that the things they authorized were not being abused, and that FISA is essential to our national security. The judges involved were not poor innocent creatures, deceived by wily bureaucratic and political operatives. They were all seasoned professionals with life-time tenure.
Walton is not personally implicated in the real 2016-2017 scandal, since he was off the FISA Court however early the conspiracy started. However, his resume and his published words point to a true believer in the world according to the Beltway bubble. Further, the rotten jurists are his colleagues, men and women in a very small judicial community. Now this true believer appears to be abusing his office, to throw up a smokescreen and to throw mud on a true legal professional, who came back into government to restore the rule of law over political operatives hiding behind civil service status. Judge Walton knows what his fellow jurists did wrong and knows that Attorney General William Barr, and the apparently incorruptible John Durham, is close to bringing to public light the illegal conduct Walton’s pals enabled.
Published in Law
A great post. What a terrible judge. It’s pretty scary really, especially if the FISA Court is politicized.
Maybe it’s time for him to say “Good night, John Boy” and step down.
I see what you did there.
It’s an attempt at swaying public opinion during the election cycle and nothing more, since the redacted sections don’t change the reality that the Mueller prosecutorial team, staffed with Democratic supporters, would have brought charges against Trump if there was even the remotest possibility to prove those charges. The dispute over the redactions didn’t alter the report’s final outcome, only how Team Muller wanted to frame the report, versus what Barr and the reviewers at the DOJ thought was information that should be made public, and what should be kept classified.
Walton believes there were little or no security issues involved here, and that the redactions were all done to spare Trump from embarrassment. He wants that to be part of the 2020 election cycle, in part because he knows the media would spin the new details as somehow being ‘shocking new evidence‘ that would then justify rehashing, if not reopening the case before Election Day, as if Mueller and his prosecutors hadn’t seen the redacted sections of the report, either, because Barr had ordered them redacted.
The irony of course is you have an ex-FISA court judge going all-in on a document dump here, not because it would alter anything in the final Mueller report, but simply in the hopes the salaciousness of it and the spin that would follow might alter enough voters’ perceptions to get Trump taken out of office in November. For Walton, keeping secrets is important only up to the point the right people can be hurt by not keeping them.
I’m tired of judges who use the bench to play political games. Resign and become a politician if you want to play the game . . .
As someone who knows what existed before the FISA court I must say it I preferred that system than what is today.
Basically a group of political appointees, I believe the Sec of State, National Security Advisor and Presidential Science Advisor. Three people who knew if there excesses got loose in the world of the press that there heads would be on the chopping block.
Not a bunch of unelectable judges and federal prosecutors.
Do we really think that John Kerry, Susan Rice and John Holdren would have signed off on investigating a presidential campaign, if they had to sign there names to a piece of paper that could be leaked to Fox News?
Our robed masters are seeing less need to fool the rubes into thinking that the rule of law still exists. The velvet glove is starting to get in the way.
I am OK with letting him see the Grand Jury material and having him promise not to leak it. Judges see this stuff all the time. The “Need to Know” question is an issue but, should any of the Grand Jury material leak, it would be obvious who did it. His intemperate outburst is a question, though. I would vote for ending the FISA court, period.