Justice Department backing away from Roger Stone sentencing proposal, source says
The Justice Department said Tuesday it will take the extraordinary step of lowering the amount of prison time it will seek for Roger Stone, an announcement that came just hours after President Donald Trump complained that the recommended sentence for his longtime ally and confidant was “very horrible and unfair.”
Atty. Gen. William Barr has been a steady ally of Trump’s, declaring the president not guilty of obstruction of justice even when special counsel Robert S. Mueller III had pointedly declined to do so and asserting that the FBI’s Russia investigation — which resulted in charges against Stone — had been based on a “bogus narrative.”
It is extremely rare for Justice Department leaders to reverse the decision of its own prosecutors on a sentencing recommendation, particularly after that recommendation has been submitted to the court. Normally, U.S. attorneys have wide latitude to recommend sentences on cases that they prosecuted. Besides, judges invariably frown upon crimes that they see as perverting the functions of the criminal justice system, such as making false statements or obstructing an investigation.Federal prosecutors also recently softened their sentencing position on former national security advisor Michael Flynn, saying that they would not oppose a probation of punishment after initially saying that he deserved up to six months in prison for lying to the FBI.
Witnesses in the case testified that Trump’s campaign viewed Stone as an “access point” to the anti-secrecy site WikiLeaks, which was in possession of more than 19,000 emails hacked from the servers of the Democratic National Committee and tried to use him to get advance word about hacked emails damaging to Hillary Clinton.
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