A former career prosecutor at the Justice Department accused Attorney General William Barr of doing “lasting damage to the institution” for intervening in the cases of Roger Stone and Michael Flynn.
Jonathan Kravis, who was a federal prosecutor for a decade, resigned in February after Justice Department leadership undercut a seven-to-nine-year prison sentence recommendation for Stone, a longtime friend of President Trump who was convicted of witness tampering and lying to Congress.
“I thought that the handling of the Stone case, with senior officials intervening to recommend a lower sentence for a longtime ally of President Trump, was a disastrous mistake that the department would not make again. I was wrong,” Kravis wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post.
Kravis argued the Justice Department “put political patronage ahead of its commitment to the rule of law” by filing to dismiss the charges against Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with a Russian diplomat.
“In both cases, the department undercut the work of career employees to protect an ally of the president, an abdication of the commitment to equal justice under the law. Prosecutors must make decisions based on facts and law, not on the defendant’s political connections. When the department takes steps that it would never take in any other case to protect an ally of the president, it betrays this principle,” Kravis wrote. “For the attorney general now to directly intervene to benefit the president’s associates makes this betrayal of the rule of law even more egregious.”
Kravis said he finds it hard to believe that Barr was acting in good faith in overriding prosecutors’ recommendations because there is no evidence that the Justice Department has acted similarly in cases not involving the president’s allies.
“Where are the narcotics cases in which the department has filed a sentencing memorandum overruling career prosecutors? Where are the other false-statements cases dismissed after a guilty plea?” he wrote. “There are none. Is that because the only cases in the United States that warranted intervention by department leadership happened to involve friends of the president? Of course not.”
