Prosecutor will testify about Barr’s intervention
WASHINGTON» A career Justice Department prosecutor who quit the case against President Donald Trump’s friend Roger Stone Jr. after political appointees intervened to seek a more lenient sentence has agreed to testify under subpoena next week before the House Judiciary Committee.
House Democrats issued subpoenas Tuesday to the prosecutor, Aaron S.J. Zelinsky, along with a second Justice Department official, John W. Elias, who has also agreed to testify in public June 24 about politicization under Attorney General William Barr — setting up a potential fight with the department about what they will be permitted to say.
Elias is a career official in the Justice Department’s antitrust division, which opened an inquiry into a fuel efficiency deal between major automakers and the state of California; congressional Democrats have called the scrutiny politically motivated.
Democrats are calling the officials whistle-blowers, suggesting they are covered by federal laws that prohibit reprisals against civil servants who give information to Congress.
The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said in a statement that Barr has refused to testify himself, so the committee was moving forward with oversight of his actions without him.
Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman, declined to comment.
The ability of lower-level officials to testify about internal executive branch matters without permission can be subject to dispute. The executive branch sometimes claims that such matters are privileged. Still, it has limited ability to block officials who have been subpoenaed by Congress and who want to comply with those legal demands to testify.
Zelinsky, an assistant U.S. attorney in Maryland, had been a member of the office of Robert Mueller, the special counsel appointed to lead the investigation into whether Trump campaign officials coordinated with the Russian government in its 2016 election interference operation. He continued to handle the case against Stone, which spun off that inquiry.
In February, when Stone was due to be sentenced for crimes related to trying to sabotage a separate congressional inquiry into the Russian matter in order to protect Trump, Zelinsky was one of four career prosecutors who abruptly withdrew from the case when the Justice Department revised its recommendation for Stone’s sentence.
The department had just suggested a sentence of seven to nine years, in line with standard guidelines. But Trump then attacked the recommendation on Twitter as unfair, and department political appointees, overruling career prosecutors, submitted a revised recommendation seeking greater leniency.
A U.S. District Court judge ultimately sentenced Stone to slightly more than three years in prison. But the sequence set off an uproar over whether Barr was giving special treatment to a Trump ally.