NBC: DOJ IG Reviewing Roger Stone Sentencing Memo Debacle

Roger Stone, former advisor to President Donald Trump, arrives for the second day of his trial at the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse on November 6, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
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The February fracas around the Justice Department’s sentencing recommendations for Roger Stone is now being probed by the office of DOJ Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz, NBC News reported Monday.

The report, based on two unnamed sources, gave few details on what exactly the watchdog is looking into and how far along he is in his review. One source told NBC News that the investigation was launched after Aaron Zelinsky — a career DOJ official who had led the Stone prosecution — testified before Congress about “political pressure” within the Department to lighten the sentencing recommendation submitted for Stone.

Zelinsky and three other prosecutors working on the case withdrew from it when the Department filed a memo that overruled the initial recommendation they offered for Stone.

Stone’s sentence was commuted by President Trump, his longtime associate, in July.

The prosecutors initially recommended that Stone serve seven to nine years in prison, after a jury convicted him of making false statements and tampering with a witness in the House’s Russia investigation.

After the DOJ filed a new brief, at the direction of Attorney General Bill Barr, watering down that recommendation, Stone’s judge sentenced him to around four years.

Barr has pointed to that sentence as vindicating his move to overrule the career prosecutors. But the judge at Stone’s sentencing hearing called the DOJ’s handling of the matter “unprecedented,” while questioning some of the arguments made in the revised memo for why the recommendation was being watered down.

Zelinksy testified to Congress that, before the initial memo was filed, then-Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Timothy Shea “was receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice to cut Stone a break.”

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Notable Replies

  1. Exactly how ‘independent’ is Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz. Does he have any effective pull? Sure - in sane times - and IG would be heeded and his recommendations gold. But is this just a fart in the wind? If he issues a ‘memo’ saying “Yup - this whole interference was unprecedented and speaks of political partisanship. I don’t like it - but there’s no recourse” - where’s the value?

  2. How did Horowitz manage to escape being fired by the tRump Crime Family? One might come to think its just a matter of time before the axe eventually falls on Horowitz as well.

  3. Avatar for paulw paulw says:

    Given previous DOJ IG reports, this one is going to be … interesting. The earlier ones pretty much made mountains of of molehills, but I would not be surprised if this one made an atomically flat plain of Everest.

  4. Mark Meadows: “Welp, time to get rid of ANOTHER IG, Sir!”

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