Senior law enforcement officials intervened to seek a
more lenient prison sentence for President Trump’s friend and ally Roger J.
Stone Jr. for political reasons, a former prosecutor on the case is expected to
testify before Congress, citing his supervisor’s account of the
matter, reported the New York Times.
“What I heard — repeatedly — was that Roger Stone was
being treated differently from any other defendant because of his relationship
to the president,” the prosecutor, Aaron S.J. Zelinsky, said in a written
opening statement submitted on Tuesday to the House Judiciary Committee ahead
of Wednesday’s hearing. A copy was obtained by The New York Times.
Mr. Zelinsky is expected to be joined by another
current Justice Department employee, John W. Elias, a senior career official in
the antitrust division, who will tell the committee that under Attorney General
William P. Barr’s leadership, the division was forced for political reasons to
pursue unjustified investigations of the fledgling legal marijuana industry and
an antipollution pact between California and several automakers.
Democrats have portrayed both men as whistle-blowers
who are covered by laws protecting civil servants who share information with
Congress. Their emergence now, as Mr. Barr battles questions over the abrupt
firing last week of the
top federal prosecutor in Manhattan who led investigations into Mr.
Trump’s associates, is certain to fuel charges by Democratic and some
Republican critics that the attorney general has corruptly bent the department
to meet Mr. Trump’s interests and his own.
But at least in the case of Mr. Zelinsky, the
secondhand nature of his account of the intervention by Mr. Barr and the acting
U.S. attorney in Washington at the time, Timothy Shea, could undercut some of
its potential force. And even Democrats concede that with just months left in
Mr. Trump’s term, any revelations laid before Congress may have little effect
on the fate of Mr. Barr, who has repeatedly and unabashedly defended his
actions, or the department.
A department spokeswoman said that the attorney
general determined that prosecutors’ recommendation for Mr. Stone’s sentence
was “excessive and inconsistent with similar cases” and noted that a judge
ultimately sentenced Mr. Stone to about half the time — 40 months — that the
prosecutors had originally proposed.
“Mr. Zelinsky’s allegations concerning the U.S.
attorney’s motivation are based on his own interpretation of events and hearsay
(at best), not firsthand knowledge,” said the spokeswoman, Kerri Kupec, adding
that Mr. Zelinsky never spoke with any member of the department’s leadership
about the case.
The intervention in the Stone case is expected to be a
major focus of the hearing. Mr. Zelinsky and three fellow career prosecutors
recommended to a judge in February that Mr. Stone receive seven to nine years
in prison, in line with standard guidelines, for perjury and other crimes
related to his sabotaging of a congressional inquiry into Russia’s interference
in the 2016 election and links to the Trump campaign. Mr. Stone, a longtime
confidant of Mr. Trump’s, served as the Trump campaign’s principal intermediary
to WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign at the time it was publishing information
stolen by the Russians and damaging to Hillary Clinton.
But as Mr. Trump attacked that sentencing recommendation on Twitter, the
department began to work on a new, more lenient recommendation to the judge
meting out Mr. Stone’s punishment. The four prosecutors quit the case, and the
request was submitted without their signatures.
Ms. Kupec said that Mr. Barr had not discussed the
sentencing request with the president and that he had decided to intervene
before Mr. Trump tweeted about it.
Mr. Zelinsky will say that a supervisor working on the
case told him there were “political reasons” for more senior officials to
resist and then override prosecutors’ recommendation to follow the sentencing
guidelines and that the supervisor agreed that doing so “was unethical and
wrong.”
Mr. Zelinsky did not say in his written statement who
specifically told him about what was going on. Jonathan Kravis, another
prosecutor who quit the case in protest — and, unlike Mr. Zelinsky, also
resigned from the Justice Department — has written in an op-ed in The Washington Post that he “resigned
because I was not willing to serve a department that would so easily abdicate
its responsibility to dispense impartial justice.”
The intervention came days after Mr. Barr had
maneuvered the Senate-confirmed U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia,
Jessie K. Liu, out of her role and installed Mr. Shea, who had been a close
aide from his own office.
Mr. Zelinsky planned to say he was told that Mr. Shea
“was receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of
Justice to cut Stone a break” and complied because he was “afraid of the
president.” He and other line prosecutors were told that the case was “not the
hill worth dying on” and that they could lose their jobs if they did not fall
in line, according to the statement.
Mr. Zelinsky, a prosecutor in Baltimore, had been
detailed to Washington to continue work on the Stone case that was begun while
he worked for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Stone, citing the
spread of the coronavirus in federal prisons, asked a federal judge Tuesday for
a two-month delay before he is forced to begin serving his sentence, which he
was due to report for next week. His motion said that the U.S. attorney’s
office in Washington had told his lawyers that based on the department’s
guidance about handling pandemic-related issues, the government was not
opposed.
According to Mr. Elias’s written opening statement, he
will accuse the department of inappropriately using its antitrust power to
investigate 10 proposed mergers and acquisitions in the marijuana industry
because Mr. Barr “did not like the nature of their underlying business.”
The reviews consumed a large amount of the antitrust
division’s resources, he said, and document demands imposed a heavy burden on
the companies, which were forced to produce hundreds of thousands of pages that
the department in some cases did not even look at.
At least one merger fell through and stock prices
dropped as a result, he said, even though there was never a justification in
competitiveness analysis — like whether the companies trying to merge would
have too much market share — for using antitrust powers to essentially harass
the firms.
Mr. Elias said that after division staff members
expressed concerns, the head of the division, Makan Delrahim, held an all-staff
meeting in September and “acknowledged that the investigations were motivated
by the fact that the cannabis industry is unpopular ‘on the fifth floor,’ a
reference to Attorney General Barr’s offices in the D.O.J. headquarters
building.”
Mr. Elias added, “Personal dislike of the industry is
not a proper basis upon which to ground an antitrust investigation.”
Mr. Elias’s statement also portrayed an antitrust
review of a deal struck by four major automakers with the State of California
to voluntarily continue to improve fuel efficiency and reduce emissions on new
cars, despite the Trump administration’s rollback of federal standards, as
politically motivated rather than grounded in the facts and the law.
Mr. Trump had attacked the deal on Twitter, and the division began its
review without going through normal procedures, Mr. Elias said.
Asked for a response, another Justice Department
official familiar with the inquiry said that it was opened because of news
reporting that raised potential antitrust concerns, not because Mr. Trump was
angry.
Mr. Elias also said the department had all the
information it needed to close the investigation without action in November,
but “the political leadership” then asked staff members to examine California’s
announcement that it would buy only cars that met the standards to keep the
inquiry going until February.
While the testimony from the two current Justice Department
officials about inside deliberation is expected to be the centerpiece of the
hearing, the panel will also take testimony from two Republican Justice
Department officials from previous administrations — Donald Ayer, who was the
deputy attorney general under President George Bush, and Michael Mukasey, who
was the attorney general under President George W. Bush.
Mr. Ayer has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Barr,
whom he served alongside. Republicans on the committee invited Mr. Mukasey.
House Democrats have made clear they are also
interested in learning more about the firing of the top prosecutor in
Manhattan, Geoffrey S. Berman. Mr. Berman initially and publicly resisted Mr.
Barr’s pressure to step aside, prompting a furor among Democrats and former Justice
Department officials who warned that the White House was trying to force him
out because he continued to pursue sensitive cases that irked Mr. Trump.
The Judiciary Committee has reached out to Mr. Berman,
but he is not expected to appear on Wednesday.
Democrats may subpoena Mr. Barr himself as soon as
this week to testify, but there is no guarantee he would appear. The attorney
general has resisted such appearances in the past and his department has
promulgated legal guidance challenging the validity of some past subpoenas from
House Democrats, effectively shielding officials from testimony.
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