Federal Prosecutor To Testify He Was Pressured To Give Stone A Break Because The US Attorney Fears Trump

“In the many cases I have been privileged to work on in my career, I have never seen political influence play any role in prosecutorial decision making. With one exception: United States v. Roger Stone.

“What I saw was the Department of Justice exerting significant pressure on the line prosecutors in the case to obscure the correct sentencing guidelines calculation to which Roger Stone was subject — and to water down and in some cases outright distort the events that transpired in his trial and the criminal conduct that gave rise to his conviction.”

“What I heard — repeatedly — was that Roger Stone was being treated differently from any other defendant because of his relationship to the president. I was told that the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Timothy Shea, was receiving heavy pressure from the highest levels of the Department of Justice to cut Stone a break, and that the U.S. Attorney’s sentencing instructions to us were based on political considerations.

“I was explicitly told that the motivation for changing the sentencing memo was political, and because the U.S. Attorney was afraid of the President.” – Federal prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky, who quit the case after the DOJ tried to overrule his sentencing recommendation.