Apparently, we’re supposed to be upset that a group of four prosecutors, who told the Department of Justice one thing about what they’d recommend as a sentence for former Trump adviser Roger Stone and then told a federal judge another, are out of that job.
According to National Review:
All four Justice Department prosecutors who sought seven to nine years of jail time for Roger Stone have withdrawn from the case after reportedly misleading DOJ officials over the sentencing recommendation.
And according to Fox News (hat tip: The Federalist), they left quite a mess for the DoJ to do over:
The Justice Department is preparing to change its sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone after top brass were “shocked” at the stiff prison term initially being sought, according to a senior DOJ official.
Federal prosecutors had recommended that Judge Amy Berman Jackson sentence Stone to between 87 and 108 months in prison for his conviction on seven counts of obstruction, witness tampering, and making false statements to Congress on charges that stemmed from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
“The Department was shocked to see the sentencing recommendation in the filing in the Stone case last night,” the official told Fox News. “The sentencing recommendation was not what had been briefed to the Department.”
Good riddance to people who can’t tell the truth.
This hasn’t stopped House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer from leading a call for yet another investigation.
According to Axios:
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sent a letter to the Justice Department inspector general requesting an investigation into the reduced sentencing recommendation, writing: “This situation has all the indicia of improper political interference in a criminal prosecution.”
According to a second story from Axios:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is leading calls for an investigation after the Department of Justice made a downgraded sentencing recommendation for President Trump’s associate Roger Stone.
“By tweet @realDonaldTrump engaged in political interference in the sentencing of Roger Stone. It is outrageous that DOJ has deeply damaged the rule of law by withdrawing its recommendation. ‘ Stepping down of prosecutors should be commended & actions of DOJ should be investigated.”
Apparently, objecting to prosecutors who lie is now a new “impeachable” for Trump for this bunch, which ought to be engaging in some kind of introspection (or therapy to control their rage), given the spectacular failure of their earlier impeachment bid, which has affected their political fortunes.
The real story is that Trump-crazed overzealous prosecutors trapped themselves in their own web of lies by being unable to restrain themselves from dishing out a reasonable sentence recommendation against what they told their bosses. For that, they need to get the boot.
As you might expect, the people who recommended the draconian sentence for Stone had been Mueller team operatives, who, recall, were exclusively Democrat, many Democrat donors.
The Federalist’s Sean Davis, who’s been keeping tabs on this story like a rat-dog dick, explained very well what was really going on:
Stone’s sentencing recommendation isn’t the first to raise eyebrows. In January, the prosecutors overseeing the case against former White House National Security Adviser Michael Flynn also abruptly changed their sentencing recommendation for him from parole potential time in prison. That sentencing recommendation was filed just one day after former D.C. U.S. Attorney Jessie K. Liu was nominated by Trump for a position outside DOJ. The name of Brandon Van Grack, the former Mueller prosecutor who wrote that particular sentencing memorandum, was conspicuously missing from the most recent government filings in the Flynn case, raising questions about whether he was still allowed to work on the case. Flynn is currently in the process of trying to withdraw his guilty plea of lying to the FBI.
The arrest of Stone, with the big SWAT team show and CNN cameras, was clearly a dirty-cop affair, and so was the freelance draconian sentence recommendation for Stone, who was convicted of process crimes such a lying to Congress, which was done after telling the DoJ the recommendation would be lighter. Their claim that Stone merited a long sentence due to “witness intimidation” was nonsense, too, given that the witness said he wasn’t threatened.
Seriously, nine years for an old man for lying to Congress? As if that place isn’t a spectacular repository of lying in itself, Exhibit A: Adam Schiff?
Here in San Diego yesterday, a guy who shot a college student dead in a scuffle got six years. But Stone, see, gets nine. Just don’t tell the bosses. Sleight of hand, see? We are talking dirty cops.
Shockingly, all four with this record of lying are still on the job in other capacities, with one going back to corrupt Baltimore to be a U.S. attorney. Any defense attorney in any case he works on is going to use this record of lying to get clients off.
Yet now the press is reporting this as political interference in sentencing (since when is tolerating lies from politically interested people ‘political interference’?) and Pelosi and Schumer are back at it, calling for more Get Trump.
It just doesn’t stop. One can only hope that the whole thing can come to nought for Stone, who’s been put through the mill on stupid and unimportant stuff, and Pelosi and Schumer can find themselves trapped again in their own web of lies.
