Roger Stone’s sentencing proposal change was ‘highly unusual’ but politics didn’t play an improper role, DOJ watchdog says
CNN
The Justice Department’s decision to water down the sentence proposal for Roger Stone, a Donald Trump ally convicted of lying to Congress, was was “highly unusual,” the department’s internal watchdog said Wednesday, but that it did not find evidence that politics played an improper role.
The Justice Department’s decision to water down the sentence proposal for Roger Stone, a Donald Trump ally convicted of lying to Congress, was was “highly unusual,” the department’s internal watchdog said Wednesday, but that it did not find evidence that politics played an improper role. The investigation was launched after the Justice Department issued a second sentencing memo for Stone called for a prison sentence “far less” than the 7-9 year recommendation his trial team initially put forward. The reversal came after Trump tweets bashing the initial recommended range, and on the day the second memo was filed, all four members of the Stone trial team quit the case – one of them resigning from the Justice Department altogether. Stone was sentenced to 40 months in prison, but that sentence was ultimately commuted by Trump. However, the inspector general found in Wednesday’s report that even career department lawyers believe “reasonable minds” can disagree on whether the initial sentencing recommendation for Stone was too high. The report also revealed that after Aaron Zelinsky, one of the line prosecutors on Stone’s case, testified to Congress in 2020 about indications of improper pressure to cut Stone a “break,” top officials in the US attorney’s office reported him for allegedly false testimony to the DOJ office that investigates misconduct by its attorneys.
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