Missing: Key Documents About Alleged Misconduct By Robert Mueller’s Lead Prosecutor

Andrew Weissmann, the lead prosecutor for Special Counsel Robert Mueller, has a history of questionable conduct. But the full extent of Weissmann’s alleged prosecutorial misconduct is unclear because some of the most serious charges were hidden behind redactions and secreted in sealed court filings.

Two months ago I sued to have these records released, but late Friday federal Judge Sim Lake’s case manager confirmed that several of the sought-after documents are missing from the court record.

In early November, Houston attorney Kevin Fulton of the Fulton Law Group filed a motion in a Texas federal court to unseal and unredact court records related to claimed prosecutorial misconduct by Weissmann during the latter’s stint as the head of the Enron Task Force.

In a joint motion to dismiss the criminal charges filed against them, four individuals connected to the Enron collapse alleged that Weissmann had improperly threatened witnesses to keep them from speaking with defense lawyers. In support of their motion, the defendants included an email Weissmann had sent to the lawyer of a “critical witness.” What exactly Weissmann said, though, is unclear, as the brief redacted the details:

 
Even if cause originally existed to keep the content of this email secret, with the underlying criminal cases now complete, there is no longer a basis to hide the details from the public. Thus, my motion to unredact the public record asked Judge Lake, who had presided over the criminal cases, to release unredacted copies of several court filings, most significantly the joint motion to dismiss, which included this email and other relevant details.

Over the holidays, though, the court entered an “amended notice,” announcing that after “a full and exhaustive” search by the clerk, certain court filings “were unrecoverable in their original or un-redacted form,” including the unredacted copy of the joint motion to dismiss and the supporting memorandum. Also missing from the court record was the government’s unredacted response to this motion, which likely would have included the full text—or relevant portions—of the Weissmann email.

Additionally, in the amended notice the court stated that it could not find in the case records the unredacted copy of the declaration made by Michael Tigar, an expert witness who averred that in his 40 years of experience trying criminal cases in state and federal courts, he had never seen such “unfair pressures brought to bear on the adversary system in a single case.” Several of Tigar’s other conclusions, however, were hidden behind redactions.

 
Finally, the court stated that “Docket Entry No. 568: Sealed Document” was missing from the record. But the subject matter of that sealed document is completely unknown because the public docket does not even list Docket Entry 568.

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