Given the nature of Stone's offenses and the fact that the jury foreperson was a Trump-hating activist the sentence seemed excessive, especially since far greater crimes, like homicide, often draw lighter sentences.
Barr's recommendation didn't sit well with the DOJ lawyers who prosecuted the case and so four of them resigned in a huff.
Trump haters across the nation saw an opportunity here to draw blood from one of the president's stellar appointments, and a petition was circulated among former Department of Justice employees demanding Barr step down. Democrats have threatened to impeach him in the House of Representatives for tainting the DOJ by allegedly doing a favor for the president.
The brouhaha over Barr's recommendation seems absurd, and Chip Roy, a congressman from Texas, concurs with that perception in an article at The Federalist.
Roy makes several points: One is that Barr did nothing wrong and another is that Barack Obama's Attorney Generals, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, did much worse but nary a peep was emitted by the folks who are now clamoring in righteous indignation for Barr's head on a pike.
Here are four of Roy's eight criticisms of Holder:
Even a cursory review of the record shows that Holder, and his successor Lynch, abused power in the Department of Justice for a full eight years while carrying out hatchet work for President Obama.Roy chose not to mention in his indictment of Holder his refusal to prosecute militant blacks in Philadelphia who, in clear violation of the law, were intimidating white voters at polling places when Obama was up for re-election. What Barr did is not even in the same league as Holder's abuses and malfeasances yet the media was fine with Eric Holder's tenure as head of the DOJ.
After all, in an interview with Juan Williams, Holder proudly declared himself “an activist attorney general,” and acknowledged that he turned the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division into a political weapon, saying he was “proud of it.” How soon my leftist colleagues and media flacks forget they engaged in “community organizing” for left-wing activism at the highest levels of the Department of Justice. For just several major examples:
- Under Holder, the notorious “Fast and Furious” operation was carried out. In it, guns were run to Mexican drug cartels, resulting in the death of a U.S. Border Patrol agent. Holder refused to cooperate with House investigators to turn over information.
- Holder encouraged President Obama to use executive power to unconstitutionally and illegally give status and benefits to both children and parents illegally present in the United States after failing to pass legislation. In other words, the chief law enforcement officer encouraged an end-run of the Constitution and the law, one of which courts have already struck down, while the other is being litigated.
- Holder effectively dismissed the Lois Lerner Internal Revenue Service’s clear targeting of conservative groups and refused to carry out a true investigation into this corruption.
- Holder corrupted the Civil Rights Division, turning it into a radical political organization—led once by Tom Perez, who is now the head of the Democratic National Committee. DOJ’s own inspector general concluded in a report that the division was guilty of “deep ideological polarization” and a “disappointing lack of professionalism.”
He concludes:
So let’s keep a little perspective....there are very clear differences here. With the current situation and no matter what has been tweeted, [Stone's] conviction stands, the judge controls [the sentencing], [Barr has merely made] a recommendation, and there are reasonable questions that would lead to Barr or his team [to make the recommendation].Attorney General Barr did nothing wrong in recommending a more just sentence for Roger Stone, and had he been Eric Holder recommending a fairer sentence for some friend of President Obama's the media would surely be praising and fawning over him for it.
We should not let the media and a bunch of left-wing activists ... to obfuscate the facts [about what Barr has done], nor to ignore the unbelievably rampant abuse at the DOJ under the most recent Democrat administration.