The Trump administration: Governing by grievance & retaliation

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

Personally, I think that reputation was blown with Alberto Gonzalez under Bush 43.

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.

As Barr recently said, Trump makes it impossible for them to do their jobs.

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.

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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.

Ability to make a pretzel of yourself is a job requirement for working in this administration.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Deconstructing America

For decades after Watergate, the White House treated the Justice Department with the softest of gloves, fearful that any appearance of political interference would resurrect the specter of Attorney General John Mitchell helping President Richard M. Nixon carry out a criminal conspiracy for political ends.

[...]

Trump’s ground-shaking conduct has demolished those once-sacrosanct guardrails. Mr. Barr’s intervention to lessen a prison sentencing recommendation for the president’s convicted friend Roger J. Stone Jr. prompted all four career prosecutors handling the matter to quit the case.

To career prosecutors around the country, the Stone case raised new fears of what is to come. Until now, according to conversations with more than a dozen career lawyers in some of the 93 U.S. attorney’s offices, they had watched other divisions in the Justice Department execute significant shifts in response to Mr. Trump while the work of prosecuting crimes was largely unaffected by the politics of the moment. Now career prosecutors said they worried they might face more pressure.

  NYT

I think you can guarantee it.

Prosecutors across the United States, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals, said this week that they had already been wary of working on any case that might catch Mr. Trump’s attention and that the Stone episode only deepened their concern. They also said that they were worried that Mr. Barr might not support them in politically charged cases.

I think you can guarantee that, too.

For the most part, modern presidents have stayed away from cases involving their friends or associates, at least publicly. If they weighed in, it usually came in the form of clemency shortly before leaving office, as when Mr. Bush pardoned former Reagan administration colleagues caught up in the Iran-contra scandal or when President Bill Clinton pardoned his half brother and his former business partner.

One notable exception was President Barack Obama, who during the 2016 presidential campaign said that he did not believe that Hillary Clinton had harmed national security by using a private email server but was guilty only of carelessness — remarks that Republicans immediately criticized as interference with an open F.B.I. investigation.

And they were right.

Mr. Trump’s allies have said he has every right as the head of the executive branch to oversee investigations, even those in which he has a personal interest, and that he is trying to correct the political excesses of a law enforcement system he sees as biased against him and his team. They point most often to the mishandling of a surveillance warrant against Carter Page, a onetime Trump campaign adviser, which an independent investigation criticized.

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The main focus of the president’s effort to mix politics and prosecutions has been the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, which traditionally oversees many delicate political prosecutions, including national security, espionage and political corruption cases. Until recently, the U.S. attorney for Washington was Jessie K. Liu, who oversaw Mr. Stone’s prosecution, but Mr. Barr maneuvered to get her out of that position and install a longtime close aide in her place a few weeks before the sentencing.

[...]

Some conservatives have viewed Ms. Liu, a Trump appointee who worked in the Justice Department in the second Bush administration, with suspicion. When she was nominated last year to be associate attorney general, Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, protested because she had been associated with the National Association of Women Lawyers, a group that opposed the confirmation of Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court in 2006. (Mr. Lee is a former Alito clerk.) Actually, Ms. Liu had signed a petition in support of Mr. Alito’s confirmation, but Mr. Trump withdrew her nomination, anyway.

[...]

When it became clear that Ms. Liu would not stay until she was confirmed, it raised suspicions among some in the U.S. attorney’s office. Those were only compounded in late January when Mr. Barr designated Timothy Shea, a longtime trusted adviser, as her temporary successor rather than letting her top assistant serve as caretaker.

Mr. Shea arrived on Feb. 3 with David Metcalf, another perceived Barr loyalist, to serve essentially as his chief of staff. Mr. Metcalf immediately caused discord when he moved a prosecutor from her office so that he could work adjacent to Mr. Shea, according to two people familiar with the move.

[...]

One week later, they faced a dilemma when the four career prosecutors working on the Stone case proposed recommending a sentence of seven to nine years, in line with nonbinding federal sentencing guidelines.

On Monday, several people familiar with the matter said, Mr. Shea told the prosecutors that he wanted a lower sentence, reminding them that they had discretion to deviate from the guidelines. But three of the four prosecutors threatened to quit the case, so Mr. Shea acquiesced until Mr. Barr and the deputy attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, overruled him on Tuesday.

[...]

Soon after he was sworn in last February, Mr. Barr inserted himself into politically charged investigations, seeking information in particular from the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan about cases involving the administration, according to people briefed on the matter. His interest was not unheard-of; prosecutors typically update Washington about high-profile cases.

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At one point during discussions about the scope of campaign finance laws, Mr. Barr essentially questioned the legal theory behind [Trump lawyer Michael] Cohen’s case, one of the people said. He also questioned whether such cases could be prosecuted civilly, rather than criminally.

[...]

The Washington office is grappling with a number of other politically charged cases, including investigations into whether the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey leaked classified information to reporters, and whether his former deputy Andrew G. McCabe misled an inspector general. The office is also handling the sentencing of Michael T. Flynn, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser.

If people of conscience continue to resign - as they should - I wonder how a Democratic president - should we get one some day - will manage to rebuild the agencies and offices Trump has turned into his personal den of thieves.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.