Ex-prosecutor plans to tell House panel Stone sentencing politicized

Senior law enforcement officials intervened to seek a more lenient prison sentence for President Donald Trump’s friend and ally Roger Stone for political reasons, a former prosecutor on the case is expected to testify before Congress on Wednesday, citing his immediate supervisor’s account of the matter.

“What I heard — repeatedly — was that Roger Stone was being treated differently from any other defendant because of his relationship to the president,” said the prosecutor, Aaron Zelinsky, in a written opening statement submitted Tuesday to the House Judiciary Committee ahead of Wednesday’s hearing.

Zelinsky will say that a supervisor working on the case told him there were “political reasons” to shorten prosecutors’ initial sentencing guidelines and that the supervisor agreed that doing so “was unethical and wrong.”

Zelinsky said he and his fellow prosecutors raised concerns in writing and in conversation.

Zelinsky did not say in his written statement whom he was referring to.

Attorney General William Barr directed the intervention days after he maneuvered the Senateconfirmed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jessie Liu, out of her role and installed in her place as acting U.S. attorney a close aide from his own office, Timothy Shea.

Zelinsky plans to say he was told Shea “was receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice to cut Stone a break” and complied because he was “afraid of the president.”

Zelinsky is expected to testify that he and other line prosecutors were told they could lose their jobs if they did not fall in line.

A Justice Department spokeswoman had no immediate comment.

Zelinsky and three fellow prosecutors ultimately withdrew from the case in protest, after department officials overrode their recommendation that Stone receive seven to nine years in prison, in line with standard guidelines. The officials submitted a new, more lenient recommendation to the judge meting out Stone’s punishment. Stone was convicted of seven felonies committed in an effort to impede a congressional inquiry that threatened Trump.

Zelinsky is expected to be joined by another current Justice Department employee, John Elias, a senior career official in the antitrust division, who will tell the committee that under Barr’s leadership, other department actions that have received significantly less attention have also been torqued.

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