On Tuesday: “Senior Justice Department officials intervened to overrule front-line prosecutors and will recommend a more lenient sentence for Roger J. Stone Jr.” The original prosecution team had recommended 7-9 years but that was downgraded to: “the government defers to the Court as to what specific sentence is appropriate under the facts and circumstances of this case.” This came after Trump tweeted that Stone was being treated unfairly in sentencing.
Four prosecutors on the Stone case resigned due to this intervention.
According to the New York Times: “Mr. Barr and his lieutenants intervened on Tuesday hours after Mr. Trump assailed the original sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years in a middle-of-the-night Twitter eruption. The president congratulated Mr. Barr on Wednesday “for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control and perhaps should not have even been brought” and said prosecutors “ought to apologize” to Mr. Stone. But numerous legal scholars say that Mr. Trump has shredded norms that kept presidents in check for decades, undermining public trust in federal law enforcement and creating at least the perception that criminal cases are now subject to political influence from the White House.”
This article has a good tick-tock of the decision making process: On Monday, several people familiar with the matter said, Mr. Shea told the prosecutors that he wanted a lower sentence, reminding them that they had discretion to deviate from the guidelines. But three of the four prosecutors threatened to quit the case, so Mr. Shea acquiesced until Mr. Barr and the deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, overruled him on Tuesday.
As Lawfare points out, this episode casts a new light on the DOJ’s decision last month to lower Flynn’s sentencing recommendation from 0-6 months jail time to probation, for which no explanation was offered.
Here is Marcy Wheeler on this: “Stone was silent, until the time that the Probation Office provided the sentencing range for the crimes that was built in to the way that Mueller charged this just over a year ago. That is, by charging Stone with witness tampering, Mueller built in the possibility that Stone would be facing the steep sentence recommended yesterday. And that steep sentence may have been envisioned not as the sum of what Stone’s actual actions entailed — certainly every single warrant save the last four showed probable cause that Stone had done far more, but rather as leverage to get Stone to tell what he knows about Trump’s involvement in all this.”
On Thursday Barr gave an interview to ABC in which he said Trump’s tweets made it “impossible for me to do my job” and that “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody.”
John Kelly is publicly speaking out against Trump, the Ukraine scheme, and the firing of Vindman: When Vindman heard the president tell Zelensky he wanted to see the Biden family investigated, that was tantamount to hearing “an illegal order,” Kelly said. “We teach them, ‘Don’t follow an illegal order. And if you’re ever given one, you’ll raise it to whoever gives it to you that this is an illegal order, and then tell your boss.’”