The prosecutor in charge of the Missouri grand jury that declined to indict a white police officer in the shooting death of Michael Brown released more grand jury documents Monday — but still held back the FBI's interview with the man who was with Brown the day he was killed.
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Bob McCulloch promised to make public all of the witness testimony heard by the grand jury, and he released more than 5,700 pages of documents on Nov. 24, the day the announcement that former Ferguson police Officer Darren Wilson wouldn't be indicted was announced.
After NBC station KSDK of St. Louis reported Monday that an FBI interview with Dorian Johnson — the widely reported second man who was with Brown on Aug. 9 — was missing from the papers, McCulloch released several hundred more pages on Monday, along with more than 50 audio files of police radio traffic and Brown's official autopsy report.
McCulloch released the new materials without explaining why they weren't in the initial repository of documents and without explaining why some were still being withheld despite his promise to release all of them. While the initial cache of documents did include a transcript of Johnson's testimony before the grand jury, neither set of papers includes a record of Johnson's interview with the FBI less than a week after the shooting and before he testified.
McCulloch said Nov. 24 that an important factor that led the grand jury not to indict Wilson was that several witnesses' recollections had changed over time — which he said reporters and legal analysts could see for themselves by reading the grand jury records. That remains impossible to do with Johnson's account, however, as long as his pre-grand jury statements to federal investigators remain closed.
KSDK quoted Ed Magee, McCulloch's executive assistant, as saying Monday that while McCulloch was sincere in his promise of full transparency, the prosecutor's office had "turned over and relinquished control" of some FBI interviews. He said the federal government asked St. Louis County not to release records that are part of the Justice Department's separate civil rights investigation of the shooting.