Prosecutors quit Stone case after intervention
WASHINGTON — Four prosecutors withdrew Tuesday from the case of Roger Stone, the longtime friend of President Donald Trump, after Trump criticized the case as a “miscarriage of justice” and senior Justice Department officials intervened to recommend a more lenient sentence for Stone.
The highly unusual move prompted one of the government’s key prosecutors to resign altogether.
Federal prosecutors in Washington had asked a judge late Monday to sentence Stone to seven to nine years in prison for trying to sabotage a congressional investigation to protect the president.
As he did after a jury speedily convicted Stone on seven felony charges in November, Trump attacked federal law enforcement officials, saying “the real crimes were on the other side.”
“Cannot allow this miscarriage of justice!” Trump added.
Late Tuesday afternoon, prosecutors submitted a new filing that made no specific sentencing recommendation, saying only that the earlier guidance was excessive and “does not accurately reflect the Department of Justice’s position on what would be a reasonable sentence.” The government still believes “incarceration is warranted” for Stone, they wrote.
“Ultimately, the government defers to the court as to what specific sentence is appropriate under the facts and circumstances of this case,” said the filing, which was signed by John Crabb Jr., a federal prosecutor who joined the case earlier in the day. None of the four prosecutors on Monday’s memo signed it.
The development was a tumultuous turn in one of the most high-profile cases brought by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, whose investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election cast a lengthy shadow over Trump’s presidency. Disagreements between United States attorneys and their Justice Department superiors rarely burst into public view, especially in criminal cases that have commanded the public spotlight for months.
Hours after the Justice Department said that it would lower Stone’s guidelines, a prosecutor on the case, Jonathan Kravis, told the court he had resigned “and therefore no longer represents the government in this matter.”
And two members of Mueller’s team who helped lead the prosecution of Stone, Aaron Zelinsky and Adam C. Jed, withdrew from the case. Zelinsky also resigned from a special assignment with the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, though he will continue to work for the Justice Department in Baltimore. A fourth prosecutor, Michael J. Merendo, also withdrew.
Department officials defended its intervention, saying they were taken aback by the request for such a stiff sentence, according to a law enforcement official who offered the department’s view of what happened on condition of anonymity because the Stone case was ongoing.
‘Abuse of power’
The prosecutors had suggested a lighter prison term in discussions with Justice Department officials, the official said. The department decided to override the prosecutors’ decision soon after the sentencing memorandum was filed Monday evening, said Kerri Kupec, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department.
She said that department officials did not discuss the case with anyone the White House, including the president, and were not reacting to any directive from Trump or to his criticism on Twitter.
Stone, 67, was convicted in November of obstructing an investigation by the House Intelligence Committee into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, lying to investigators under oath and trying to block the testimony of a witness who would have exposed his lies. The jury deliberated for just seven hours.
Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who chairs the House committee, said that if the president intervened in any way to reverse the decision of career prosecutors, it would be “a blatant abuse of power.”
“Doing so would send an unmistakable message that President Trump will protect those who lie to Congress to cover up his own misconduct and that the attorney general will join him in that effort,” he said in a statement.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson
of the Federal District Court in Washington is scheduled to sentence Stone on Feb. 20.
In their sentencing memorandum Monday, federal prosecutors said that Stone should serve up to nine years because he threatened a witness with bodily harm, deceived congressional investigators and carried out an extensive, deliberate, illegal scheme that included repeatedly lying under oath and forging documents.
Even after he was charged in a felony indictment, the prosecutors said, Stone continued to try to manipulate the administration of justice by threatening Jackson in a social media post and violating her gag orders.
The combination of those factors justified significantly increasing the range of punishment recommended under federal sentencing guidelines from 15 to 21 months to up to nine years, they said. While the guidelines are advisory, federal judges typically consider them carefully.
‘Vastly overblown’
Defense lawyers characterized the prosecutors arguments as vastly overblown. Stone not only never intended to harm the witness, they said, he never created any real obstacle for investigators. While the witness, a New York radio host named Randy Credico, refused to testify before the House Intelligence Committee, they pointed out, he was later repeatedly interviewed by the FBI, appeared before the federal grand jury and testified against Stone during his trial.
In a letter asking Jackson to spare Stone a prison term, Credico said that while he stood by his testimony, he never believed Stone would carry out his threat to injure him or his beloved dog. “I chalked up his bellicose tirades to ‘Stone being Stone.’ All bark and no bite,” Credico wrote.
Stone’s defense team also said that his violations of Jackson’s gag orders should not count against him because the criminal proceedings had exacerbated his “long-standing battle with anxiety” and he has corrected that problem through therapy.
The decision to seek a more lenient punishment for Stone came less than two weeks after prosecutors backed off on their sentencing recommendation for Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, who pleaded guilty to lying to investigators in the Russia inquiry. Prosecutors had initially sought up to six months in prison, then said they would not oppose probation instead of prison time.
One of the prosecutors in the Flynn case, Brandon L. Van Grack — who had taken on the case under Mueller and continued to work on it after he left that office to rejoin the Justice Department’s national security division — did not sign the memo in support of probation, though he had signed earlier briefs in the case.
The intervention by senior Justice Department officials in Stone’s case serves as the first big test for Timothy Shea, who last Monday became the interim head of the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, which is overseeing some of the department’s most politically fraught cases.
Shea, a former senior counselor in the office of Attorney General William Barr, now oversees investigations into two former law enforcement officials whom Trump has long perceived as political enemies: former FBI director James Comey, who is said to be the focus of investigators in an unusual inquiry into years-old leaks; and his former deputy Andrew McCabe, who faces allegations that he misled investigators in an administrative inquiry. That case has languished.