The motion is embedded below but essentially says: ‘If we knew you were going to put these in the public record we would not have given them to you’.  Obviously the Eric Holder led DOJ was more than happy to assist the Sherrod BGI enterprise in their efforts against Breitbart Inc., but they appear to have anticipated the documents being sealed and now are twitchy about the potential sunlight.

BACKSTORY VIA POLITICO – The Obama administration is fighting to keep secret hundreds of pages of emails detailing White House involvement in the 2010 firing and attempted rehiring of Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod after the late conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart published a blog post and video clips suggesting Sherrod was a racist.
Lawyers for Breitbart’s business partner, Larry O’Connor, filed the White House and USDA documents in federal court in Washington in May in connection with a libel suit Sherrod filed over the blog post, which appeared on Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com website. However, last week, Justice Department lawyers urged U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon to keep the documents from the public by maintaining them under seal.

Court filings are normally public, but the Justice Department said the emails from the accounts of nine White House staffers and an additional number of Agriculture Department officials should be kept under wraps in part because the public already has enough information through official statements about Sherrod’s forced resignation and the ensuing events.
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[…] the Justice Department lawyers also invoke a deference to “Presidential confidentiality” as a basis for keeping the contents of the emails secret.
“The Office of the President occupies a ‘unique position in the constitutional scheme’ and ‘the public interest requires that a coequal branch of Government afford Presidential confidentiality the greatest protection consistent with the fair administration of justice,'” Glass and Goldberg wrote, quoting the 2004 Supreme Court case granting such deference to Vice President Dick Cheney in connection with records relating to the Energy Task Force he headed.
The U.S. government is not a party to Sherrod’s lawsuit, which seeks damages from O’Connor and Breitbart. Breitbart died unexpectedly in 2012. His wife, Susannah, has been substituted as a defendant in the suit.
Leon has not yet ruled on the government motion to keep under seal the documents the government has designated as “confidential.”  (read more)