Four lawyers quit Roger Stone case in protest over meddling

Washington: Four lawyers who prosecuted Roger Stone quit the case on Tuesday after the US Justice Department said it would take the extraordinary step of lowering the amount of prison time it would seek for President Donald Trump's longtime ally and confidant.

Roger Stone is a longtime Republican provocateur.Credit: AP

The decision by the department came just hours after Trump complained that the recommended sentence for Stone was "very horrible and unfair". The department said the sentencing recommendation was made on Monday night - before Trump's tweet - and prosecutors had not spoken to the White House about it.

The four lawyers, including two who were early members of special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia team, had made up the Justice Department's trial team and had signed onto a Monday court filing that recommended up to nine years in prison for Stone. All three quit the case, and one, Assistant US Attorney Jonathan Kravis, also quit the department.

Stone was convicted by a jury in November of lying to Congress and tampering with a witness. His was the last conviction secured by Mueller as part of his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The department's decision to back off the sentencing recommendation raised questions about political interference and whether Trump's views hold unusual sway over a department that is meant to operate independently of the White House in criminal investigations and prosecutions.

In a stunning rebuke of career prosecutors that will surely raise questions about political meddling in the case, a senior department official said it "was shocked to see the sentencing recommendation in the Roger Stone case last night".

"That recommendation is not what had been briefed to the department," the official said. "The department finds the recommendation extreme and excessive and disproportionate to Stone's offences. The department will clarify its position later today."

The senior official, though, said the decision to revise the prosecutors' recommendation came before Trump's tweet.

Stone has been a friend and adviser to the President since the 1980s and was a key figure in Trump's 2016 campaign to discover damaging information on Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

Attorney-General William Barr has been a steady ally of Donald Trump.Credit: AP

Attorney-General William Barr has been a steady ally of Trump's, clearing the President of obstruction of justice even when Mueller had pointedly declined to do so and declaring that the FBI's Russia investigation - which resulted in charges against Stone - had been based on a "bogus narrative."

That message from up high likely won't go unnoticed by other prosecutors examining activities of Trump confidantes, including his personal lawyer Rudi Giuliani and former Blackwater chief executive Erik Prince, according to several legal experts.

"What we're seeing is the Justice Department allowing itself to be used to protect the President's allies," said Elie Honig, a former federal prosecutor. "If you apply that to the Rudy Giuliani case, it does not bode well for the independence of the investigation. If I was a line-level prosecutor working on that case, I'd be seriously concerned that I would be overruled and undermined by the forces within the DOJ."

Giuliani was being investigated in November by federal prosecutors in New York for possible campaign finance violations and a failure to register as a foreign agent, according to three US officials. There have been no public developments in the investigation since.

As Monday's court deadline neared for the prosecutors to give a sentencing recommendation for Stone, it was still unclear what the office would do, after days of tense internal debates on the subject, according to people familiar with the matter.

Frontline prosecutors, some previously from Mueller's team, argued for a sentence on the higher end, while their bosses wanted to calculate the guidelines differently to get to a lower prison sentence. The debate centred around whether they should seek more prison time for obstruction that impedes the administration of justice, these people said.

In the end, the office filed a recommendation in keeping with the line prosecutors' goals, and rejecting the lighter recommendation sought by their superiors, the people said.

Hours before the filing was due on Monday, the new head of the DC office, interim US attorney Timothy Shea - a former close adviser to Barr - had not made a final decision on Stone's sentencing recommendation, according to the sources within the Justice Department, who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the internal deliberations.

Disagreements among prosecutors about sentencing recommendations are not uncommon, especially when it comes to politically sensitive high-profile cases. It would have been unusual, however, for the US attorney's office to endorse a sentence below the guideline range after winning conviction at trial, according to former federal prosecutors.

AP, with The Washington Post, Bloomberg