TRUMP RENEWS ATTACKS AGAINST U.S. JUSTICE SYSTEM
President berates ‘dirty cops’ within law enforcement
WASHINGTON
President Donald Trump once again berated the “dirty cops” of the law enforcement establishment Thursday, accusing the Justice Department of going after his friends but not his enemies in an outburst that flouted Attorney General William Barr’s pleas to stop publicly intervening in prosecutions where he had a personal interest.
Speaking out hours after his friend Roger Stone was sentenced to more than three years in prison for lying to protect the president, Trump belittled the case and hinted broadly that he would use his clemency power to spare Stone if a judge did not agree to a retrial sought by defense lawyers.
In essentially dangling a pardon or a commutation for a friend, Trump confronted Barr with a choice about how to respond after he declared last week that the president’s attacks on the criminal justice system were making his job “impossible.”
“A lot of bad things are happening, and we’re cleaning it out,” Trump said of law enforcement at a Las Vegas event for former convicts re-entering society. “We’re cleaning the swamp.
We’re draining the swamp. I just never knew how deep the swamp was.”
He added: “We had a lot of dirty cops. FBI is phenomenal. I love the people in the FBI. But the people at the top were dirty cops.”
Barr last week reversed the Justice Department’s original request, in line with federal guidelines, for a term of seven to nine years for Stone, leading four career prosecutors to quit the case and one to resign from the department altogether.
But even as he agreed with Trump that the sentencing recommendation was excessive, he went on ABC News to publicly ask the president to stop commenting because “I cannot do my job here at the department with a constant background commentary that undercuts me.”
Trump later agreed that he was making Barr’s job harder but indicated he would not stay quiet.
While Trump again erupted Thursday, some in Barr’s camp took solace in the fact that the president did not directly attack the judge in the case, Amy Berman Jackson, the prosecutors or the sentence itself and that he said he admired the FBI rank and file, even though he continued to target its current and former leadership.
Barr has come to recognize that he may never be able to keep Trump quiet altogether and so in parsing the president’s latest comments, the attorney general and his team chose to see them as progress and an opportunity to work out their differences without further public exchange.
Barr, who has suggested to associates that he may have to resign if the president keeps tweeting about individual prosecutions, stayed silent after Trump’s remarks, and the department declined to comment.
Over the last week, some of Trump’s closest Republican allies in Congress, including Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and some of the president’s favorite Fox News commentators have been trying to smooth over the rift by vouching for Barr and urging the president to let the legal process play out, according to people familiar with the matter.
After the judge sentenced Stone on Thursday, Graham noted on Twitter that the term was “on the lower end” and emphasized that a president could always grant clemency. He urged that there be no undue interference in legal cases — without quite saying whom he was addressing.
Baker writes for The New York Times.