A longtime political confidant of Trump and a Republican consultant, Stone was found guilty by a jury in November 2019 of lying to a House panel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. At sentencing, front-line prosecutors initially notified the court that a sentence of about seven to nine years would be appropriate under federal guidelines.
Within hours of that filing, and after Trump tweeted that the request was “disgraceful” and a “miscarriage of justice” that could not be allowed, Barr overruled the trial team. A second memo signed by supervisors retracted the recommendation, prompting all four prosecutors to quit the case. Some of them later said publicly that they believed they were undercut by department leaders to protect Trump’s longtime ally.
Stone was ultimately sentenced to a little more than three years behind bars, which Trump later commuted, sparing him prison time.
The Stone sentencing triggered a crisis of confidence in Barr and the Justice Department through the end of Trump’s presidency, prompting hundreds of former employees to call for Barr’s resignation and to exhort active employees to report any unethical conduct or politicization of decisions.
After a four-year investigation, the office of Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz repeatedly called Barr’s intervention in the case “extraordinary.” However, it said it found no evidence of direct interference by Trump and instead blamed “ineffectual leadership” by Timothy J. Shea, then acting U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., who was supervising the case and who had been on the job for two weeks.
Barr declined to be interviewed for the inspector general’s investigation, but denied in testimony to the House and news interviews at the time that Trump’s Twitter tirade prompted the reversal. Instead, Barr said Shea — formerly one of his closest advisers at the department — had initially signaled to him that the recommendation would be much lower. Barr said he had been “very surprised” by the outcome.
Horowitz’s office found that “rather than taking the approach he discussed with Barr, and despite telling Barr that he believed the Guidelines range was unreasonable,” Shea authorized line prosecutors to issue a stiffer recommendation. Barr expressed to staffers that the action was not what he and Shea had discussed and needed to be “fixed,” but the inspector general found that Barr’s position was consistent before and after the recommendation was filed and before Trump tweeted.
“Based on the evidence described in this report, we concluded that the sequence of events that resulted in the Department’s extraordinary step of filing a second sentencing memorandum was largely due to Shea’s ineffectual leadership,” the report concluded.
The report added, however, that prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky’s later testimony to Congress that he and the rest of the trial team had been pressured to revise the memorandum for political reasons “was not unreasonable.” It cited statements by another prosecutor and “speculative comments” by a supervising prosecutor about possible political interference. The supervisor was not named, but identified by title as the fraud and public corruption unit chief, the job that was being held by J.P. Cooney at the time. Cooney now works for special counsel Jack Smith’s office.
The supervisor told investigators that he was not speaking from actual knowledge when he told the trial team that Shea was “afraid of the President” and when he told other supervisors that politics was driving Shea’s decision-making, the report said.
The report stated that the supervisor’s speculative comments were “not well considered” and unnecessarily further complicated the case.
“We recognize that the Department’s handling of the sentencing in the Stone case was highly unusual,” given the participation of Trump political appointees Shea and Barr, the report stated. However, it concluded that absent any prohibition on their involvement, their actions were ultimately left up to their own “discretion and judgment,” including on how they would affect public perceptions of the department’s integrity and independence.
Zelinsky attorney Joshua Matz said in a statement: “The rule of law depends on prosecutors pursuing and telling the truth. My client is gratified the report confirms that he told the truth about what he saw and heard.”
Representatives for Shea, Barr and the Trump 2024 presidential campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Cooney declined through a spokesman to comment, but the report said his counsel responded that his concerns “were not entirely speculative” based on Trump’s statements before and after the sentencing request and Shea’s appointment. His counsel added that the criticism of him would inappropriately chill future internal department discussions about the improper politicization of sensitive cases.
The report opens a window back on a bitterly contentious time in the department, when Barr was accused of undercutting special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and of politicizing and replacing the leaders of two of its most important U.S. attorney offices for Washington and Manhattan.
Those accusations intensified after Barr removed Trump’s initial appointee as U.S. attorney two weeks before Stone’s sentencing, replacing Jessie K. Liu with his own counselor, Shea. Soon after, Barr led the department to ask a judge to erase the guilty plea of Michael Flynn. The former Trump national security adviser was accused of lying to the FBI about his interactions during the presidential transition with Sergey Kislyak, at the time the Russian ambassador to the United States.
Mueller ultimately found evidence was insufficient to conclude that Trump or his associates conspired with Russians to interfere in the campaign, although he issued detailed findings of potential obstruction of justice by the nation’s commander in chief that were not the Justice Department’s role to prosecute.
A former Stone prosecutor, Jonathan Kravis, wrote in an opinion article that in both Stone’s and Flynn’s cases, “The department undercut the work of career employees to protect an ally of the president, an abdication of the commitment to equal justice under the law.”
In an interview, Kravis said Wednesday’s inspector general report underscored his point, saying, “Is this really how you want top Justice Department political appointees to behave in these kinds of cases, taking extraordinary steps to benefit a friend and campaign adviser of the president who was convicted of lying to cover up for him?”
Barr has said he was “doing the law’s bidding” to correct FBI misconduct in Flynn’s case, and that he was not influenced by Trump in modifying a sentencing recommendation that was adopted by a judge.
Barr launched a reexamination of how government agents hunted for possible links between the Trump campaign and Russian efforts to interfere in the presidential election, but later broke with Trump. Barr contradicted the former president’s false claims about the 2020 election and called him “a very petty individual who will always put his interests ahead of the country’s,” but said in April that he would vote for Trump in November.
Trump has privately discussed plans to punish critics if elected to a second term, including by investigating former allies and top appointees who became critics of his time in office as well as of FBI and Justice Department officials.
correction
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of years of the government’s initial sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone. The article has been corrected.
