Roger Stone slammed the team of Justice Department prosecutors who oversaw his case in a scathing op-ed, calling the lead prosecutor a “partisan legal thug” and “leftist ambulance chaser.”
Stone, who was convicted last year of obstructing a congressional investigation, unloaded on the legal team that put him away in a lengthy editorial in the Daily Caller, published late Sunday.
In particular, Stone took issue with the nine-year jail sentence the prosecutors had initially recommended. It was later overturned by Attorney General William P. Barr, who suggested a more lenient sentence.
The sentencing fracas touched off a media firestorm in Washington.
“Ambushing their own department and using dishonest trickery to file an outlandish punishment recommendation in a high-profile case is hardly what one might expect from principled crusaders for justice,” Mr. Stone wrote.
“Notwithstanding their laughable canonization by the media, the truth is that these partisan manipulators posing as prosecutors knew exactly what they were doing and engineering a media controversy was precisely the result they sought,” he continued.
Next, Stone took aim at each member of the prosecution team, dubbing them “the Mueller lynch mob.”
He called lead prosecutor Jonathan Kravis, who recently left the Justice Department, as a “leftist ambulance chaser,” and a “partisan legal thug.”
Another prosecutor, Aaron Zelinsky, was derided as a “manipulative thug” and “deceitful hypocrite.” Mr. Stone accused the prosecutor of making up false claims in the prosecution of former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos.
Stone also lambasted prosecutor Jeannie Rhee for donating nearly $15,000 to the campaigns of President Obama and Hillary Clinton.
All three prosecutors had withdrawn from the Stone case after Mr. Barr reduced the sentencing recommendation, which Stone slammed as nothing more than a media stunt.
“Had these prosecutors simply complied with DOJ professional practice, had they offered their department colleagues slightly better treatment than sheer contempt, they would have denied themselves the opportunity to pompously grandstand as aggrieved public servants compelled by their scrupulous ethics to withdraw from the case in protest,” he wrote.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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