The FBI will be allowed to cooperate in the prosecution of U.S. Park Police officers for involuntary manslaughter in the killing of Bijan Ghaisar, the Justice Department announced in a letter sent earlier this month.

The change, a reversal from the Trump Administration’s stance in the case, will allow prosecutors to have access to the agents who investigated the Nov. 2017 shooting.

The decision was made June 1 and the Washington Post obtained the letter on Monday.

In the letter, Attorney General Merrick Garland authorized Justice Department personnel “to contact the Commonwealth’s Attorney immediately to discuss your requests for access to information about the federal investigation and any evidence in the possession of the FBI. We will share with the Commonwealth all appropriate information and evidence.”

The letter follows a request by Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring and Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano, who asked Garland in May to prosecute the case after Trump’s administration chose to not pursue charges. The letter did not say whether the administration will seek federal prosecution of Alejandro Amaya and Lucas Vinyard, the two Park Police officers who shot and killed Ghaisar in Nov. 2017.

In a joint statement, Herring and Descano said welcome Garland’s announcement. “We remain fully committed to pursuing justice for the family and community in this case, and are encouraged that the Justice Department is cooperating with this pursuit,” they said.

Previously, Herring and Descano urged the Justice Department to allow the federal agents who investigated Ghaisar’s killing to testify and share evidence in a separate case against the officers that is pending in a federal court. The Justice Department has so far refused to allow the agents to testify in the case; federal attorneys have said such testimony would present a conflict of interest with the government’s defense of a civil lawsuit Ghaisar’s family filed against the Park Police.

Ghaisar was 25 when Vinyard and Amaya fatally shot him in his car. The officers’ pursuit of Ghaisar began along George Washington Memorial Parkway and ended in a residential neighborhood in Fairfax County, where they shot at him multiple times as his car slowly moved away from them. Ghaisar died in a hospital 10 days later.

In 2019, the Justice Department declined to pursue charges against the two officers. The department said its investigation could not prove that the two U.S. Park Police officers “willfully” violated the federal criminal civil rights statute.

“As this requirement has been interpreted by the courts, evidence that an officer acted out of fear, mistake, panic, misperception, negligence, or even poor judgment cannot establish the high level of intent required to prove such a violation,” the department wrote in its press release.

The department is defending the Park Police in a civil wrongful-death suit filed by Ghaisar’s family.

The FBI has released little information about its investigation of Ghaisar’s killing. Instead, the most detailed video accounting of the events leading up to Ghaisar’s death was released by the former Fairfax County police chief, Edwin C. Roessler, in 2018.

That video of the shooting, captured by the in-car video camera of a Fairfax County officer who was trailing behind Ghaisar and the Park Police, showed that Ghaisar did not appear to provoke the Park Police officers right before they shot him. His window was closed, and as his car was slowly moving forward away from police, officers fired a total of at least nine shots at him.

The Park Police’s use of force policy, the Washington Post reported, says that officers should not fire at moving vehicles without a reasonable belief that “the subject poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to another person.”

In a statement, Rep. Don Beyer (D-Virginia) expressed his support for Garland’s decision — and said he hopes it pushes the case forward.

“It is important that the Justice Department follow through and do all that is right and proper to ensure that justice is finally done,” he said. “For years under the previous administration the Justice Department shrouded this case in an unacceptable level of opacity, stonewalling every attempt to establish the truth. Now we have reason to hope that a new era of accountability and transparency has arrived.”

Reporter Jenny Gathright contributed to this story.