contempt of Congress vote. The Justice Department took the position that disclosure of the unredacted Mueller Report would require the department to violate "the law, court rules and court orders" as well as grand jury secrecy rules. During May 1, 2019, testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Barr stated he accepted Mueller's interpretation of the law that was applied in the Report. However, in a May 30 CBS News interview, Barr said he had applied his own interpretation of the law and took the position that obstruction laws cannot apply to presidents who abuse their official powers to impede an investigation for a corrupt reason. Barr elaborated: "As a matter of law... we didn't agree with the legal analysisa lot of the legal analysis in the report. It did not reflect the views of the department." In March 2020, Reggie Walton, a federal district judge originally appointed by President George W. Bush, criticized Barr's characterizations of the Mueller report as "distorted" and "misleading". Walton made his comments while presiding over a lawsuit on whether the Mueller report should be released without redactions. As Walton saw it, Barr's "lack of candor" undermined Barr's "credibility and, in turn, the department's" arguments before the court. Walton had concerns that Barr may have made a "calculated attempt to influence public discourse" in favor of President Trump by establishing "a one-sided narrative" about the report contrary to the report's findings. Walton questioned if the report's redactions were actually "self-serving" to avoid conflict with Barr's statements, and if the Justice Department used "post-hoc rationalizations" to defend Barr. Thus, Walton decided to personally review the redacted material to check if the redactions were justified. On September 3, Walton ruled that the redaction of FBI reports of witness interviews was proper. On September 30, he ruled the DOJ had violated federal law by redacting some portions of the Mueller report and ordered them to be released before the November election. In May 2021, federal judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled that a March 24, 2019 Department of Justice memo must be published without redactions. Previously in April 2019, Barr said that his decision to not charge Trump was made "in consultation with the Office of Legal Counsel and other department lawyers". In this lawsuit, the Department of Justice argued that since Barr relied on the advice of this memo to make his decision, this memo should not be published