As predicted, yesterday’s calm was short-lived. There were three major news items today but, put together, they added up to a surprisingly coherent narrative.
The first story was that one that has taken the media by storm: the Department of Justice, under Attorney General William Barr, today stepped into the sentencing of Trump advisor Roger Stone to reverse the recommendation the department had made yesterday.
In November, a jury convicted Stone of seven counts of obstructing and lying to Congress and tampering with witnesses concerning his role connecting the Trump campaign with Wikileaks in 2016. Career prosecutors in the Justice Department yesterday followed federal guidelines to recommend that the judge sentence him to between 7 and 9 years in prison. After they made this recommendation, Trump tweeted that the recommendations for the sentencing of his friend were “very unfair,” a “miscarriage of justice,” and a “ridiculous 9 year sentence recommendation.” Today, the department submitted a revision to its recommendation, telling the judge the previous recommendation was “excessive and unwarranted.”
It appears the Justice Department attorneys on this case learned about the revision by hearing it on the Fox News Channel. As soon as they heard, four of them—Aaron Zelinsky, Adam Jed, and Michael Marando-- filed paperwork to be removed from the case, and one, Jonathan Kravis, resigned his position as an assistant U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C., going back to his home base as an assistant U.S. attorney in Baltimore.
It is hard to overstate the significance of this event.
The Department of Justice is supposed to defend the rule of law in America. It is not supposed to be swayed by political pressure, and traditionally, communicates with the White House only very generally, and never about specific cases. It is emphatically not the role of the Justice Department to work with the president, but rather its job is to guarantee equality before the law for everyone in America. The Attorney General is the lawyer for the American people, theoretically, while the White House Counsel is the lawyer for the office of the president. In addition, the president can have his or her own personal lawyers. But the idea that the Attorney General is working for the president undermines the whole idea of the impartial justice on which our body of laws rests.
I can’t resist noting here that, while the Constitution established an office of the Attorney General, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill creating the Department of Justice in 1870 to try to preserve the rights of African Americans in the South after the Civil War. The department’s first assignment was to stop the Ku Klux Klan in the South, and it did, indicting more than 3000 people and winning more than 600 convictions as it tried to reestablish the rule of law in the former Confederacy. That history reflects that the role of the Department of Justice is really about upholding the rule of law, not about doing any particular president’s bidding.
Even while this is going on, pundits noted that the judge, Amy Berman Jackson, whom Stone attacked online, apparently to try to get her to withdraw from the case, and then apologized when she didn’t, was unlikely to be moved by the revision. Tonight, though, Trump tweeted “Is this the Judge that put Paul Manafort in SOLITARY CONFINEMENT, something that not even mobster Al Capone had to endure? How did she treat Crooked Hillary Clinton? Just asking!” (Jackson did not put Manafort in solitary confinement.) Hillary Clinton retorted: “Do you realize intimidating judges is the behavior of failed-state fascists? Just asking!”
Meanwhile, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tweeted that Trump had “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.” Trump instantly responded “Who are the four prosecutors (Mueller people?) who cut and ran after being exposed for recommending a ridiculous 9 year prison sentence to a man that got caught up in an investigation that was illegal, the Mueller Scam and shouldn’t ever even have started? 13 Angry Democrats?”
(As an aside, can I just say I long, with every fiber of my being, for the days when profound political fights were not conducted by tweet?)
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/
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