USA TODAY International Edition
Barr caves to Trump: Worse than cronyism
Are they trying to buy Roger Stone’s silence?
Brits use the word “fizzing” to describe a bubbling anger that grows by the minute. I learned this after leaving my partner on the beach, in the middle of our vacation, while I went to the local U. S. Attorney’s Office to finish a wiretap for the FBI. It started to rain. That’s when he called to tell me he was fizzing. All I could think of was a life- size AlkaSeltzer tablet standing in the rain.
The Justice Department has entered the Twilight Zone. Its handling of Roger Stone’s upcoming sentencing has triggered a series of prosecutor withdrawals and left me fizzing.
Stone, an ally and former adviser to President Donald Trump, was convicted in November of lying to Congress and threatening a witness. The convictions stem from the hack and release of Democratic emails many believe helped Trump win the White House.
On Monday, the prosecutors who took Stone to trial filed sentencing papers that recommended a term of seven to nine years in prison. Here’s the important part: That sentence was called for by the federal sentencing guidelines that apply to all people convicted of federal crimes. Apparently believing that “friend of the president” qualifies as an exemption to the prison sentences received by ordinary people, Trump took to Twitter and decried the recommendation as “horrible,” “unfair” and a “miscarriage of justice.”
Wildly unusual
That Trump placed his finger on the scales of justice to help a political ally is bad. But what should be sending all who revere the sanctity of DOJ’s independence into a full- fizz meltdown is that it worked. The Justice Department said Tuesday that it would retract its original recommendation and ask that Stone receive a lighter sentence.
This maneuver had Attorney General William Barr’s fingerprints all over it even before Trump congratulated him for “taking charge” of the case.
It is wildly unusual to recommend a below- guidelines sentence for a person who is convicted at trial. It is reprehensible to undercut the prosecutors who successfully convicted Stone, by forcing a retraction of their sentencing papers. But it is regretfully predictable that Barr would intervene to save Trump and those in his orbit.
Barr has done it before.
He jumped special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report by releasing a mutilated summary weeks in advance, whitewashing evidence of hell and damnation into Trump’s “full exoneration” campaign slogan. He falsely claimed that the FBI “spied” on the Trump campaign. He contradicted his own inspector general’s key finding that the Russia investigation was legitimate. And he forced prosecutors to withdraw a prison recommendation for the president’s convicted former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and replace it with a recommendation of probation.
When the Justice Department filed its new Stone sentencing recommendation, it asked for a sentence that is “far less” than the sentence it requested the day before. Notably, the new sentencing papers are not signed by the prosecutors who handled Stone’s trial. That’s because all four resigned from the case, in protest of Barr’s takeover. One quit DOJ entirely.
There should be more discussion of the benefits Trump could gain if Judge Amy Berman Jackson follows DOJ’s new sentencing recommendation and gives Stone a lighter sentence.
Risk of cooperation
Stone is a pampered 67- year- old man. While orange may be his favorite color in presidents, it’s probably not so much in jumpsuit attire. Every day Stone spends in prison is another day he could decide he does not want to celebrate his 76th birthday behind bars.
The way a prisoner gets an early release is by cooperating. Given Stone’s close relationship with Trump, and his VIP seat at the center of the Russia investigation, if he decided to cooperate, he could cause a lot of problems for the president.
Reducing the amount of time Stone spends in prison dramatically reduces the risk to Trump that he will tell federal investigators what he knows — and where they can find emails, photos, recordings and documents he has likely stashed away against the day he needs them to save his own skin.
And so, Barr’s move is likely more nefarious than its obvious favoritism reveals. At best, it’s using DOJ to give favors to a Trump ally that would not be available to anyone else. At worst, it’s an effort to buy Stone’s silence.
As leader of the Justice Department, Barr should be the inspirational standard for the prosecutors who work day in and day out to support DOJ’s righteous mission. Instead, Barr has chosen the path of political hack. And his cosmetic public protest Thursday, saying Trump should stop tweeting about pending cases, doesn’t change that.
I’m going to be presumptuous and speak not only for myself but also for many of the federal prosecutors who devoted their professional careers to the Department of Justice. We are fizzing. But mostly, we are sad to watch a once honorable American institution devolve into a useful tool of a corrupt president.