Personally, I think that reputation was blown with Alberto Gonzalez under Bush 43.Skepticism of [Timothy] Shea, the acting U.S. attorney for Washington, [...] deepened in his 600-person office when Mr. Barr quickly intervened to recommend a lighter sentence for [Roger] Stone just as the president declared on Twitter that the government was treating his friend too harshly.
Within a day, Mr. Zelinsky and three others quit the case, one resigning from his job entirely. Their protest engulfed the Justice Department in turmoil that could damage its treasured reputation for political independence.
NYT
As Barr recently said, Trump makes it impossible for them to do their jobs.The Washington office, which operates separately from the main Justice Department, took over the continuing cases last year from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, after he closed his inquiry into Russia’s election interference. He found insufficient evidence to charge anyone tied to the Trump campaign with conspiring with Moscow but charged several Trump associates with other crimes, including Mr. Stone.
The tensions between the office, the Justice Department and the White House date back further than the tumult in the Stone case. They have been simmering since at least last summer, when the office’s investigation of Andrew G. McCabe, a former top F.B.I. official whom the president had long targeted, began to fall apart.
Mr. Shea’s predecessor, Jessie K. Liu, a lawyer whom Mr. Trump had appointed to lead the office in 2017, pressed the McCabe case even after one team of prosecutors concluded that they could not win a conviction. After a second team was brought in and also failed to deliver a grand jury indictment, Ms. Liu’s relationship with Mr. Barr grew strained, people close to them said.
[...]
Prosecutors liked Ms. Liu in part because they felt she shielded them from political pressures, even as Mr. Trump publicly accused Mr. McCabe on Twitter of lying and misconduct. And she had a reputation for being a good soldier who had stayed on even as she was passed over for top Justice Department posts.
[...]
[H]er exit unnerved prosecutors and set off the chain of events that culminated in the current crisis, in which prosecutors in the office began to worry that Mr. Barr was intervening in sensitive cases for political reasons.
[...]
When Mr. Shea took over on Feb. 3, he knew he had inherited a series of political land mines. What he did not appear to realize was how mistrustful many of the federal prosecutors in Washington had become of the main Justice Department, and of Mr. Barr.
[...]
The McCabe case had always been politically charged: Investigators were scrutinizing an accomplished former top law enforcement official whom the president had repeatedly attacked for his deep involvement in the Russia investigation. The inquiry focused on whether he misled internal investigators examining the source of disclosures of sensitive information in a Wall Street Journal article.
But the case eventually fell apart because a number of hurdles proved too steep, including problematic witnesses and prosecutors’ concerns that Mr. Barr’s handling of the special counsel report would make their case look politicized.
[...]
The two main prosecutors, Kamil Shields and David Kent, also came to believe that they could not get a jury to convict Mr. McCabe, the people said. They concluded that Mr. Trump’s relentless broadsides against Mr. McCabe had poisoned any potential jury.
Ability to make a pretzel of yourself is a job requirement for working in this administration.An indictment seemed imminent after Ms. Liu and the deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, rejected pleas in September from Mr. McCabe’s lawyers to drop the investigation. The grand jury hearing the case was reconvened after months of inactivity, but the prosecution never appeared to advance.
The investigators’ difficulties began to creep into view in news reports, creating an awkward situation for Ms. Liu.
For months, her office refused to tell Mr. McCabe’s lawyers what was happening with the case. Informing a defense team eager to publicly clear its client would have almost certainly provoked the president’s anger.
[...]
Ms. Liu sought a top Treasury Department job, and Mr. Barr made no attempt to stop her, according to three people briefed on her job search.
[...]
By mid-January, administration officials found an assignment for her at the Treasury Department to take on while she awaited confirmation, and she sent an officewide email saying she would leave earlier than planned. Some of the prosecutors and other employees in the U.S. attorney’s office viewed the announcement and her departure just two weeks later as an abrupt end to her tenure and said they feared she was ousted because she failed to deliver on a prosecution that Mr. Trump openly sought.
Mr. Shea, who comes from a family of law enforcement officers, took over the office in early February.
[...]
Within days of Mr. Shea’s arrival, the Stone sentencing brought tensions to a head.
[...]
Mr. Shea was caught off guard. Even though he agreed with Mr. Barr that following the guidelines allowed for too harsh of a punishment recommendation, he told associates he could not afford to alienate the Stone trial team as his first act on the job.
On the day that the filing was due, Mr. Shea told the attorney general that the prosecutors planned to stick to their recommendation but that “he thought that there was a way of satisfying everybody and providing more flexibility,” Mr. Barr said in an interview with ABC News.
Mr. Barr was left with the misimpression that the team would lay out the factors for Judge Amy Berman Jackson to weigh under the federal guidelines but ask for a lesser sentence. Their filing proved otherwise.
Mr. Barr told ABC that he immediately asked that prosecutors replace it with a more lenient request. But coming alongside the president’s middle-of-the-night protest on Twitter, it created the appearance that the attorney general was heeding political pressure.
[...]
The four prosecutors who withdrew from the Stone prosecution left behind more than a year’s worth of work in the final stages of the case. The chaos crushed morale in the U.S. attorney’s office, according to eight current and former Justice Department employees. Federal prosecutors around the country began to privately articulate fears of political interference.
[...]
Judge Jackson sentenced Mr. Stone last week to more than three years in prison, challenging one of the case’s new prosecutors about the recent disarray. He apologized, but also caused more confusion when he defended the argument for a stiff sentence without disavowing the request for a lighter punishment.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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