Justice Department watchdog says no evidence Trump influenced Roger Stone’s sentencing

The Justice Department’s internal watchdog said Wednesday there is no evidence that then-President Donald Trump pushed Attorney General William P. Barr in 2020 to reverse prosecutors’ stiff sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, a longtime Trump friend and adviser.

In an 85-page report, Justice Department Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz concluded there is an “absence of evidence” that Mr. Barr’s decision was influenced by Mr. Trump’s criticism of the sentencing recommendation.

“No law, rule, regulation or DOJ policy, including those related to conflicts or ethics prohibited Barr’s participation in the Stone sentencing and, therefore, the decision whether to participate was ultimately a discretionary one left to the judgment of the Attorney General,” Mr. Horowitz wrote in the report.

“We found that it was within the Attorney General’s discretion to correct what he viewed as an unjust submission,” he wrote later.

Still, Mr. Horowitz said Mr. Barr’s decision to change the sentencing recommendation was “an extraordinary step” that raised “questions and his perceptions” because of Mr. Stone’s friendship with the president.

In November 2019, a federal jury in Washington convicted Mr. Stone on seven criminal counts, including lying to Congress and obstructing the House investigation into whether Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign coordinated with Russia in the 2016 election.

The four federal prosecutors who worked the case recommended that Mr. Stone receive a prison sentence of between seven and nine years. Prosecutors said the proposal adhered to federal sentencing guidelines and was calculated based on a formula that takes into account the severity of the crime, the type of conduct involved and the defendant’s criminal history.

Hours later, Justice Department officials said they would take the unusual step of revising the sentencing recommendation. Timothy Shea, the then-U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, issued a new legal filing saying Mr. Stone deserved “far less” time in prison than the seven- to nine-year span recommended by prosecutors.

The filing, which did not offer a new sentencing recommendation, came hours after Mr. Trump had criticized the Justice Department’s proposal for Mr. Stone’s punishment as unduly harsh.

In his filing, Mr. Shea said the prison recommendation “does not accurately reflect the Department of Justice’s position on what would be a reasonable sentence” and that the original proposal by prosecutors was “excessive and unwarranted.”

The reversal prompted the four prosecutors in the case to resign from the Justice Department.

Ultimately, Mr. Stone was sentenced to three years in prison, but Mr. Trump commuted his sentence in 2020 before he was to report to prison. Mr. Trump pardoned Mr. Stone in December 2020.

Mr. Horowitz said the investigation found no evidence that Justice Department leadership exerted pressure on Mr. Shea to change the prosecutors’ sentencing recommendation. However, he concluded that Mr. Shea’s “ineffectual leadership” led to Justice Department officials, including Mr. Barr, stepping in to reverse the prosecutors.

The report blasts Mr. Shea as indecisive and “a poor communicator.” He had raised concerns about prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations but didn’t know what to do about it. After struggling with what to do for days, Mr. Shea went to Mr. Barr just hours before the filing deadline, according to the report.

Before Mr. Shea reached out to Mr. Barr, the attorney general had no involvement in the Stone case. During their conversation, Mr. Shea left Mr. Barr with the impression that prosecutors would defer to the court on sentencing, the report said. Thus, Mr. Barr had learned from media reports that prosecutors had recommended a sentence inconsistent with what Mr. Shea told him earlier that day.

“We found that Shea’s ineffectual leadership set in motion a sequence of events that contributed to the trial team viewing his actions with suspicion and resulted in DOJ leadership taking the extraordinary step of changing a filed sentencing recommendation,” Mr. Horowitz wrote.

After discussing it with his staff, Mr. Barr drafted a second memorandum reversing the prosecutors’ initial recommendation. The report concluded that Mr. Barr sought to change the recommendation hours before Mr. Trump began criticizing prosecutors in a series of tweets shortly before midnight.

“The available evidence is that all the discussions between Shea and Barr, and between Barr and his staff concerned whether the advisory sentencing guidelines range was just and whether the Department should support a variance from it,” Mr. Horowitz wrote. “We noted that even career lawyers at the DC [U.S. Attorney’s Office] believed at the time that reasonable minds could differ about the sentencing recommendation.”