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Many details about President Donald Trump’s decision to
withhold military aid from Ukraine still haven’t been made public even after his
impeachment and Senate trial that led to his acquittal Feb.  5.

Looking to find out more, the Center for Public Integrity filed a motion Friday in its ongoing federal lawsuit seeking emails between Pentagon and White House officials — emails that detail how the Trump administration delayed about $250 million in military aid to Ukraine. Congress approved the aid, and the Pentagon announced it, on June 18, but Trump’s administration didn’t release the money until Sept. 11.

The Public Integrity filing argues that even if lawmakers
didn’t get the full story of what happened to the aid, voters need to know
before November’s presidential election.

“It is imperative that the citizenry have information that
will shed light on the president’s clear violation of law, including the
execution of his illegal directive and efforts by government agencies to
justify and explain it,” the court filing says.

The lawsuit stems from a Freedom of Information Act request filed
in September by Public Integrity.
Government officials failed to deliver emails within the time limit for public
record requests, and Public Integrity
sued.

After some legal wrangling, the Department of Justice
provided 292 pages of documents in two batches in December. The pages offered
clues that Trump administration officials debated the hold on Ukraine
funds. But they were largely indecipherable due to extensive redaction, the
official term for withholding information by blocking text with black bars.

Public Integrity
persisted, arguing that the government illegally redacted the documents. This
led to a Jan. 31 court filing
by Justice Department lawyers seeking to justify the blacked-out pages.

Susan Smith Richardson, Public Integrity’s chief executive, said the news organization “will
continue to fight for the release of the unredacted Ukraine emails to prevent further
clampdowns by the administration on the public’s right to know.

“Our legal battle with the Trump administration points to a
larger problem in our democracy: We are in an era of limited information and
unlimited disinformation,” she said.

In the Jan. 31 Justice Department filing, a lawyer from the White House Office of Management and Budget said the government redacted 24 of the documents because they were “presidential communications” — a privilege that can protect discussions of the president, vice president and their immediate advisers from public scrutiny if they are part of a decision-making process.

It’s unclear what role Trump himself may have played in the
emails. But the OMB lawyer specifically mentioned presidential assistant Robert
Blair, claiming his communications should be protected.

The idea behind the privilege is that officials might be
reluctant to engage in frank debate about potential policies if they knew their
words could one day be made public.

The Trump administration also claimed that many other redacted
documents it provided Public Integrity were protected because they covered
decision-making inside the Pentagon, a process it said started in mid-June and
continued “over the course of the summer.”

That detail is crucial: Documents are only protected if they
come from discussions ahead
of a decision.

In Friday’s filing, a lawyer for Public Integrity wrote that
nearly all of the emails that are part of the lawsuit were written after the
decision was made to hold aid to Ukraine. White House officials started asking
about the aid in mid-June, with an unofficial hold put in place shortly
afterward. The legal block on spending the money came on July 25, hours
after President Trump had his now-infamous call with Ukraine’s President
Vlodymyr Zelensky, during which Trump asked for “a favor”: the opening of an
investigation into Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President
Joe Biden and his family.

A reporter from Just Security, a website that covers national security law, reviewed roughly half of the original emails that are part of the Public Integrity case, without the redactions. The unmodified emails, according to Just Security, show Pentagon officials increasingly worried about withholding the aid and the potential that it could be illegal. These passages, where concerns were raised about the hold and White House officials acknowledged them, were redacted in the copies provided to Public Integrity.

The Government Accountability Office, an independent
auditor, delivered a report
in January supporting the Pentagon officials’ concerns saying that the holding
of the aid had been illegal under a 1974 law requiring that agencies notify Congress
if budgeted money is stalled.

The Public
Integrity court filing pointed to that auditor’s report as evidence that
the emails show wrongdoing by government officials, an exception that would
require that the documents are disclosed even if they cover decision making.

Despite Trump’s impeachment acquittal, and the partial
disclosure of the details of some of the emails by Just Security, the government still needs to release the
documents, according to Joyce Alene, a former U.S. attorney who now teaches law
at the University of Alabama.

“It’s critical that Congress and the American people have
access to information about what Trump’s administration is doing in their names
and with taxpayer dollars,” Alene, who was appointed by President Barack Obama
and spent eight years working for the Justice Department, said in an email. “The Center for Public Integrity’s use
of the FOIA statute to force turnover of some of these documents continues to
bring the light of day to actions Trump continues to try to hide.”

While Public Integrity has been fighting a legal battle for emails tied to the Ukraine aid, American Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group, sued for a different set of emails that were similarly redacted. American Oversight and Democracy Forward Foundation, another watchdog group, are filing a brief supporting Public Integrity’s case on Friday as well.

“The public is still in the dark about many details of the
president’s Ukraine scheme, a matter of immense consequence,” Austin Evers, the
executive director of American Oversight, told Public Integrity. “This is an
all-hands-on-deck moment for transparency.”

Justice Department lawyers may respond to Public Integrity’s filing by Feb. 21,
and Public Integrity will have
one more opportunity to reply.

Federal District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is expected to
rule sometime after Feb. 28 on whether the government must disclose more
information about the Ukraine aid halt.

The post Center for Public Integrity advances fight for facts behind Ukraine aid hold appeared first on Center for Public Integrity.