One of the government attorneys who resigned following the Justice Department’s intervention in the sentencing of Roger Stone charged that the department had “again put political patronage ahead of its commitment to the rule of law” by abandoning its prosecution of former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
In an op-ed published Monday in The Washington Post, former federal prosecutor Jonathan Kravis wrote that “the department’s handling of these matters is profoundly misguided,” adding that he is “convinced that the department’s conduct in the Stone and Flynn cases will do lasting damage to the institution.”
Kravis and the three other attorneys who had shepherded Stone’s successful prosecution either resigned or notified the court they were stepping off the case in February after the Justice Department determined their sentencing recommendation of roughly seven to nine years “could be considered excessive and unwarranted.”
Instead, the department submitted a revised filing that offered no specific term for Stone’s sentence after President Donald Trump blasted the prosecutors’ initial proposal as a “horrible and very unfair situation.”
Stone, Trump’s longtime informal political adviser, was convicted on all charges last November for impeding congressional and FBI investigations into connections between the Russian government and Trump’s 2016 campaign.
“I resigned because I was not willing to serve a department that would so easily abdicate its responsibility to dispense impartial justice,” Kravis wrote.
The Justice Department’s interference in that matter, Kravis argued, was just as egregious as the department’s decision last Thursday to drop its criminal case against Flynn, who had pleaded guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI about conversations he had with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. during the transition before Trump’s inauguration.
That move by DOJ came after Attorney General William Barr and department officials concluded in light of recently disclosed FBI documents that the bureau’s questioning of Flynn lacked a proper investigative basis.
Trump had also intensely criticized the Flynn investigation following the release of the records, which revealed new details about the origins of the FBI’s case and suggested internal deliberation over how to approach the politically explosive probe.
In his op-ed, Kravis noted “none of the career prosecutors who handled Flynn’s case signed that motion” to dismiss. In both the Stone and Flynn cases, he continued, “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.”
A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A group of nearly 2,000 DOJ alumni also weighed in Monday on the latest developments in Flynn’s case, again calling upon Barr to resign and accusing him of having “once again assaulted the rule of law” in a Medium blog post.
“Make no mistake: The Department’s action is extraordinarily rare, if not unprecedented,” the former department officials wrote. “If any of us, or anyone reading this statement who is not a friend of the President, were to lie to federal investigators in the course of a properly predicated counterintelligence investigation, and admit we did so under oath, we would be prosecuted for it.”
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Ex-Stone prosecutor condemns DOJ interference in Flynn case - POLITICO
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