Trump Justice Department Overrules Its Own Prosecutors On Roger Stone Sentence Hours After President Calls It Unfair, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Presidential Tweets Carried No Weight In Federal Sentencing

WASHINGTON. The Department of Justice moved Tuesday to address a procedural irregularity in which four of its own prosecutors had recommended a substantial prison sentence for a longtime friend of the President, filing a revised memorandum that characterized the original recommendation as excessive and the prosecutors who made it as, going forward, available for other assignments.

The friend, longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, had been convicted in November on seven felony counts, including lying to Congress, obstruction, and witness tampering, all arising from the same investigation into Russian interference that had benefited the President's 2016 campaign. The career trial team, citing federal sentencing guidelines, had recommended seven to nine years. Within hours of the President posting on Twitter at 1:48 a.m. that the recommendation was "a horrible and very unfair situation" that could not be allowed to stand as a "miscarriage of justice," senior department leadership independently arrived at the same conclusion and filed paperwork saying so.

All four line prosecutors withdrew from the case the same afternoon, and one resigned from the Justice Department altogether, departures that officials characterized as an orderly transition rather than a protest. "Nothing unusual happened here," said one senior administration official, noting that the department reviews sentencing recommendations all the time and that this one simply happened to be reviewed at the personal request of the defendant's most powerful acquaintance.

The President clarified the following morning that he had played no role in the decision while also congratulating the Attorney General for making it, posting that William Barr deserved thanks "for taking charge of a case that was totally out of control." Department officials maintained that the timing of the reversal, several hours after the President's tweet, reflected nothing more than a coincidence of two parties reaching the same view about the same case at roughly the same moment.

The Attorney General would later complain publicly that the President's running commentary made his job impossible, a difficulty the department managed by continuing to do precisely what the President wanted. A federal judge, retaining the authority to disregard both memoranda, sentenced Stone to forty months that month; the President commuted that sentence before Stone served a single day of it.

At press time, the Justice Department had announced a new internal review policy under which any sentencing recommendation could be revised upward or downward depending on the recommended party's personal relationship to the official conducting the review.