Judge Thomas B. Griffith, a conservative George W. Bush appointee, sided with Judge Judith W. Rogers, a progressive Bill Clinton appointee, to say that the lower court could authorize disclosure of the grand jury materials to Congress in connection with an impeachment investigation, as it had ordered in October. Judge Neomi Rao--a Donald Trump appointee--offered a lengthy dissent that would have protected the president from disclosure of the still-unreleased portions of the report.

Rao's latest efforts to shield the president from legal liability, though, appear likely to fail. The judicial precedents involved stretch back to the Nixon administration, and Rogers, in invoking them, was backed up by a jurist with conservative bona fides. Griffith added a concurrence demolishing Rao's dissent, and the DOJ now has one week to appeal the decision.* We may soon learn what is in the portions of the Mueller report Attorney General William Barr has been so desperate to keep from Congress and the public that his DOJ was willing to argue that key Watergate-era precedents should no longer be enforced.