Watchdog: No Evidence of Influence on Stone Sentence

A watchdog group on Wednesday released a report announcing a four-year investigation into the Justice Department found "no evidence" that the Trump administration improperly pressured prosecutors to reduce their sentencing recommendations for Roger Stone, a former consultant to former President Donald Trump.

Stone was convicted in 2019 of witness tampering, obstructing an official proceeding, and five counts of making false statements to federal investigators in connection to former special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Although federal prosecutors first recommended in 2020 that Stone serve seven to nine years in prison, leading officials at the Justice Department, which was under the leadership of former Attorney General William Barr at the time, later made a second filing recommending a far shorter sentence, leading the four prosecutors who tried Stone to resign.

The Justice Department's Office of Inspector General initiated an investigation in 2020. It concluded it four years later having found "no evidence" that department leaders violated department policy or committed misconduct in their recommendations for Stone's sentencing. However, it does note that the department took an "extraordinary step" in issuing a second sentencing recommendation.

The report noted that the interim U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia at the time, Timothy Shea, spoke with Barr while his office was in "extensive discussions" about Stone's sentence. The two reportedly decided that an appropriate sentence would fall below the range set by federal guidelines, but Shea would go on to authorize the initial sentencing recommendation that was "consistent with" that range.

The DOJ OIG found evidence during its investigation that Barr "immediately" suggested that the sentencing recommendation must be "fixed" after he learned of the initial recommendation and that this occurred just hours before Trump tweeted that the original sentencing recommendation for Stone was "very horrible and unfair."

"Based on the evidence described in this report, we concluded that the sequence of events that resulted in the Department's extraordinary step of filing a second sentencing memorandum was largely due to Shea's ineffectual leadership," the report stated.

It also determined that one of the prosecutors who resigned over the incident "was not unreasonable" for believing "that he (and the rest of the trial team) had been pressured to revise the memorandum for political reasons."