Chapter One

Introduction

“If the events of September 11, 2001, have proven anything, it's that the terrorists can attack us, but they can't take away what makes us

American - our freedom, our liberty, our civil rights. No, only Attorney General John Ashcroft can do that.”

 

--Jon Stewart

 

“It simply cannot be that the president can name his own temporary attorney general to supervise an investigation in which he and his family have a direct, concrete interest.”  

--Neal Katyal, Acting Solicitor General

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Real   Independence      

           

Attorney General William Barr was a puppet for President Trump and not the head of an independent Department of Justice.  President Trump interfered in the prosecution of his longtime associate Roger Stone by criticizing via twitter his sentencing. Trump also interfered with the sentencing of his former National Security Advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn.  The former President interfered with several inves-tigations being conducted by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Trump tweeted that Stone’s recommended seven to nine-year prison sentence as “horrible and very unfair.” The Justice Department announced soon after Trump’s tweet that it would seek a shorter prison term, prompting four career prosecutors to resign from the case in protest.     

The Justice Department’s decision to overrule its own prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation was highly unusual and sparked concerns that Attorney Gen. William P. Barr, who had strongly backed Trump, was bowing to political pressure to help the president’s former advisor. 

 

Barr’s interference came only four days after Trump, newly emboldened by his Senate acquittal on impeachment charges, ordered the recall of his am-bassador to the European Union and the ouster of a decorated Army officer from the National Security Council as public payback for their damaging test-imony during the inquiry.

On the evening of February 10, 2020, the team prosecuting Roger Stone submitted a 26-page memo in federal court recommending a sentence of seven to nine years in prison, within federal sentencing guide-lines. The memo raised the prospect that Stone, then age 67, could receive the harshest sentence of the half-dozen former Trump campaign aides and others char-ged in the Russia investigation.

But the next day, the Justice Department sent a revised recommendation, saying the earlier one “does not accurately reflect the Department of Justice’s position on what would be a reasonable sentence in this matter” and that the actual sentence should be “far less.”

The revised Justice Department memo urged U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who was hearing the case, to consider Stone’s “advanced age, health, personal circumstances, and lack of criminal history in fashioning an appropriate sentence.”

The move prompted a swift response from the four prosecutors who tried the case against Roger Stone and earned a conviction. Jonathan Kravis was the first to resign, both from the case and as an assistant U.S. attorney. Soon after, Aaron Zelinsky, the lead pros-ecutor on the case, notified the court that he was resigning “effective immediately” as a special pros-ecutor with the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, but would stay on as an assistant U.S. attorney in Baltimore. 

The other two federal prosecutors on the case, Adam Jed and Michael Marando, also withdrew.  These four prosecutors all had sterling credentials, including several Supreme Court clerkships.

In the entire history of the Justice Department there has never been such a brash interference with the prosecution of a case.  More than 2,000 former Justice Department officials and U.S. Attorneys wrote an open letter to the Attorney General calling upon him to resign. “It is unheard of for the Department’s top leaders to overrule line prosecutors, who are following established policies, in order to give preferential treatment to a close associate of the President, as Attorney General Barr did in the Stone case,” the letter states. “Those actions, and the damage they have done to the Department of Justice’s reputation for integrity and the rule of law, require Mr. Barr to resign.”

A national association of federal judges called an emergency meeting to address growing concerns about the intervention of Justice Department officials and President Donald Trump in politically sensitive cases.  Philadelphia U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe, who heads the independent Federal Judges Association, said the group “could not wait” until its spring conference to weigh in on a deepening crisis that has enveloped the Justice Department and Attorney General William Barr. 

 

 

Special Prosecutors

 

We would not have needed special prosecutors like Robert Mueller, Kenneth Starr, Archibald Cox or Leon Ja-worski if the Department of Justice and the Attorney General were independent of the White House.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who recused himself from the Russian inquiry, nonetheless assisted President Trump in his removal of James Comey as head of the FBI. Neither the Attorney General, nor President Trump, had the right to fire the FBI director. 

Eighty-two...Continue Reading